Tengri (; Old Uyghur: tängri; Middle Turkic: تآنغرِ; ; ; ; ; ; ; Proto-Turkic: *teŋri / *taŋrɨ; Mongolian script: , T'ngri; , Tenger; , tengri) is the Panentheism God of Heaven in the traditional Turkic peoples, Yeniseian people, Mongolic peoples, and various other nomadic religious beliefs.Bukharaev, R. (2014). Islam in Russia: The Four Seasons. Vereinigtes Königreich: Taylor & Francis. p. 78 Some qualities associated with Tengri as the judge and source of life, and being eternal and supreme, led European and Muslim writers to identify Tengri as a deity of Turkic and Mongolic peoples.BANZAROV, Dorji; NATTIER, Jan; KRUEGER, John R. The Black faith, or Shamanism among the Mongols. Mongolian Studies, 1981, S. 53–91. According to Mongolian belief, Tengri's will ( jayayan) may break its own usual laws and intervene by sending a chosen person to earth.BANZAROV, Dorji; NATTIER, Jan; KRUEGER, John R. The Black faith, or Shamanism among the Mongols. Mongolian Studies, 1981, S. 53-91.
It is also one of the terms used for the primary chief deity of the early Turkic peoples and Mongols peoples.
Worship surrounding Tengri is called Tengrism. The core beings in Tengrism are the Sky father (Tenger Etseg) and the Earth Mother (Umay). It involves ancestor worship, as Tengri was thought to have been the ancestral progenitor of mankind in Turkic regions and Mongolia, shamanism, animism, and totemism.
The Turkic form, Tengri, is attested in the 8th century Orkhon inscriptions as the Old Turkic form Teŋri. In modern Turkish language, the derived word " Tanrı" is used as the generic word for "god", or for the Abrahamic God, and is used today by Turkish people to refer to any god. The supreme deity of the traditional religion of the Chuvash people is Tură.Tokarev, A. et al. 1987–1988. Mify narodov mira.
Other reflexes of the name in modern languages include ("sky"), , .
Earlier, the Chinese word for "sky" 天 (Mandarin Chinese: tiān < Old Chinese * thīn or * thînSchuessler, Axel. (2007). An Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. University of Hawaii Press. p. 495) had been suggested to be related to Tengri, possibly a loan into Chinese from a prehistoric Central Asian language.The connection was noted by Max Müller in Lectures on the Science of Religion (1870).[1] Axel Schüssler (2007:495): "Because the deity Tiān came into prominence with the Zhou dynasty (a western state), a Central Asia origin has been suggested, note Mongolian tengri 'sky, heaven, heavenly deity'" (Shaughnessy Sino-Platonic Papers, July 1989, and others, like Shirakawa Shizuka before him)." However, this proposal is unlikely in light of recent reconstructions of the Old Chinese pronunciation of the character "天", such as (Zhengzhang)鄭張尚芳 《上古音系》(2003) 上海教育出版社 or (Baxter-Sagart),Baxter W. & Sagart, L. Baxter-Sagart Old Chinese reconstruction, version 1.1 (20 September 2014) p. 110 of 161 which propose for 天 a voiceless lateral onset, either a cluster or single consonant, respectively. Baxter & Sagart (2014:113-114) pointed to attested dialectal differences in Eastern Han Chinese, the use of 天 as a phonetic component in phono-semantic compound Chinese characters, and the choice of 天 to transcribe foreign syllables, all of which prompted them to conclude that, around 200 CE, 天's onset had two pronunciations: coronal and dorsal , both of which likely originated from an earlier voiceless lateral .Baxter, W. H. & Sagart, L. (2014) Old Chinese: A New Reconstruction. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 113-114
Linguist Stefan Georg has proposed that the Turkic word ultimately originates as a loanword from Proto-Yeniseian *tɨŋgVr- "high".Georg, Stefan (2001): Türkisch/Mongolisch tengri “Himmel/Gott” und seine Herkunft. Studia Etymologica Cracoviensia 6: 83–100.Starostin, Sergei A., and Merritt Ruhlen. (1994). Proto-Yeniseian Reconstructions, with Extra-Yeniseian Comparisons. In M. Ruhlen, On the Origin of Languages: Studies in Linguistic Taxonomy . Stanford: Stanford University Press. pp. 70–92. Partial
Amy Chua renders the name as "The Eternal Blue Sky", likely because of the connotations of the name's usage.
Prior to foreign influences, the Turkic conception of tengri was regarded as the heaven or the will controlling heaven, probably some sort of force. Out of this, the concept of a personal being developed. First, when Turkic people took over other religions, the term tengri became the name of a (personal) god or "higher being".Brill, E. J. (1993). E.J. Brill's First Encyclopaedia of Islam: 1913-1936. Ṭāʻif - Zūrkhāna. Niederlande: Brill.
Tengri was the chief deity worshipped by the ruling class of the Eurasian nomads in 6th to 9th centuries (Turkic peoples, Mongols and Magyar tribes)."There is no doubt that between the 6th and 9th centuries Tengrism was the religion among the nomads of the steppes" Yazar András Róna-Tas, Hungarians and Europe in the early Middle Ages: an introduction to early Hungarian history, Yayıncı Central European University Press, 1999, , p. 151. It lost its importance when the Uyghur Khaganate proclaimed Manichaeism the state religion in the 8th century.Buddhist studies review, Volumes 6–8, 1989, p. 164. The worship of Tengri was brought into Eastern Europe by the Huns and early Bulgars.
Tengri is considered to be the chief god who created all things. In addition to this celestial god, they also had minor divinities ( Alps) that served the purposes of Tengri.Kaya, Polat. "Search For the Origin of the Crescent and Star Motif in the Turkish Flag", 1997. [5] As Gök Tanrı, he was the father of the sun (Koyash) and moon (Ay Tanrı) and also Umay, Erlik, and sometimes Ülgen.
The most important contemporary testimony of Tengri worship is found in the Old Turkic Orkhon inscriptions, dated to the early 8th century. Written in the so-called Orkhon script, these inscriptions record an account of the mythological origins of the Turks. The inscription dedicated to Kul Tigin includes the passages (in the translation provided by the Language Committee of Ministry of Culture and Information of the Republic of Kazakhstan): "When the blue sky Tengri above and the brown earth below were created, between them a human being was created. Over the human beings, my ancestors Bumin Kagan and Istemi Kagan ruled. They ruled people by Turkish laws, they led them and succeeded" (face 1, line 1); "Tengri creates death. Human beings have all been created in order to die" (), (face 2, line 9); "You passed away (lit.: 'went flying') until Tengri gives you life again" (face 2, line 14). Khagans ruled by the will of Tengri thought the ancient Turkic people and preserved these thoughts in the texts of the Orkhon inscriptions in the following way: "I, Tengri-like and Tengri-born Turk Bilge Kaghan, succeeded to the throne at this time" ().
In one Turkic mythology, Tengri is a pure, white goose that flies constantly over an endless expanse of water, which represents time. Beneath this water, Ak Ana ("White Mother") calls out to him saying "Create". To overcome his loneliness, Tengri creates Er Kishi, who is not as pure or as white as Tengri and together they set up the world. Er Kishi becomes a demonic character and strives to mislead people and draw them into its darkness. Tengri assumes the name Tengri Ülgen and withdraws into Heaven from which he tries to provide people with guidance through sacred animals that he sends among them. The Ak Tengris occupy the fifth level of Heaven. Shaman priests who want to reach Tengri Ülgen never get further than this level, where they convey their wishes to the divine guides. Returns to earth or to the human level take place in a goose-shaped vessel.Göknil, Can. "Creation myths from Central Asia to Anatolia". Yapı Kredi Art Galleries, 1997. [8]
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