Turks are a people known as a nation of warriors since the ancient times. Since life across the steppe was characterized by harshness, this rendered ancient pagan Turks formidable and agile, a phenomenon reflected in the form of supreme talents during the battle on the part of Turkic armies, coupled with stringent discipline. It wouldn’t be exaggeration to state the history of Turks cannot be understood without understanding the historical role of the Turkic armies.

One of the most enigmatic people of the ancient history of the steppe is Modu Chanyu, without a doubt. It was frequently emphasized during my education in Turkey that the steppe people called Xiongnu by the ancient Chinese scribes were Turkic. However, today we know that the Xiongnu, called Hunlar ( Huns ) in Turkish, were a confederation of various tribes including Turks. We cannot state with certainty if Modu Chanyu was Turkic with the sparse information in our hands.

Mete, a male given name in Turkey today, is probably not of Turkic or Chinese origin. In fact, it is the Turkified form of the title of Modu or Mao-dun ( 冒顿 ) , which was recorded by the Chinese scribes. Considering how the Chinese wrote down foreign names at that time, the Chinese characters above could be representing baytur / bagtur / batır ( batur in contemporary Turkish ) , heroic titles used in the ancient Turkic and Mongolian cultures. If this notion is true, the expression recorded by the Chinese was not a personal given name, but denoting a leadership role. Hence, we could suppose that Modu was a ruler of Turkic or Mongol origin, though we do not know his real name.

There are two main notions regarding the cause and implications of the fact that the Chinese scribes used the characters Xiongnu ( 匈奴 ) while they were writing about the Huns of Inner Asia. The first is that the scribes used these characters to imitate the name the Huns gave themselves. In other words, the scribes, upon listening to the ethnic name of the Huns, wrote it down using the most similar-sounding Chinese characters in the manner that they understood it. They could have done so since the number of characters in ancient Chinese was quite limited and they didn’t have many options. One fact is that the Chinese did this not only to record the ethnic name of the Huns, but also to record the ethnic names of other steppe peoples; that is, they tried to use the most similar characters to the sounds that they perceived during the recording of the ethnic names of other peoples. One striking fact is they couldn’t have invented new characters for writing even if they had wanted to do so due to strong bureaucratic obstacles. All in all, we should only consider the expression Xiongnu as an imitation of sounds if we are to abide by this notion. Many historians in our day support this idea.

The second notion dictates that we should understand these characters through their literal meaning. According to this, the character xiong ( 匈 ) means savage, devoid of civilization, while nu ( 奴 ) conveys the meaning of slave, servant. This means that the ancient Chinese deemed the Huns of Inner Asia barbarians inferior to them and their abilities during the battle were what distinguished them. In fact, the character xiong took on the meanings mentioned above in the subsequent periods of the Chinese language, when the Chinese began to associate Huns with such negative traits. Therefore, we cannot understand with certainty the opinion the scribes writing down the ethnic name of the Huns had of them. What looks reasonable to me is that the Chinese imitated the sounds while writing down the name of the Huns.

However, the second notion is a good example of the prejudices and discussions about the concept of the civilization, which many people possess and hold even today. Many people and scholars traditionally believe that the steppe peoples were backward compared to sedentary peoples and that they had a less developed character. My personal opinion is that the traditional historical frame of reference is awkward and insufficient while attempting to explain the level and the legacy of the character and intelligence of societies. We would have to make use of fields like psychology and sociology, even personal observation and experience if we are to attempt to explain such a complex reality. Traditional established frame of reference of history fails to do this because it is often recorded and transmitted in accordance with a monocentric outlook as we can see with the Chinese mentioning Huns.

At first glance, the members of a civilization with writing, who create marvellous buildings, could be perceived as people with more advanced common sense and profundity of character. A thing that is often erroneously considered to be true is that the seemingly more advanced systems of law and administration in those societies are the result of the fact that the individuals in them are more intelligent and studious than peoples of the steppe and they have a more analytical mind. My experience and knowledge in life up to now suggests that the reality is not like this in many cases, that the differences in both types of civilization are the holistic result of more influential elements than implied by such a superficial judgment. If I am to present an opinion about civilization today, living within a settled order of civilization has become a torture for the human race in many cases; many people now have had to accept a life style away from nature, where they could only work so much as to fulfill their basic necessities within the boundaries of a milieu polluted and inhibited by technology in urban settlements, which, in my opinion, look very much like concentration camps. If any human being inside a city cannot feel more free and self-actualized than a nomad living on horseback, for me, that civilization has failed. After all, if civilization has been created for the good of mankind and if many people living in its confines are wasting away in a lifestyle that they hate only for the sake of survival ( too many working hours above the limits a human could tolerate and the mental fatigue caused by this and resources and opportunities too scarce to feed one’s soul ) and have to give up on freedom and repress their most fundamental humane instincts to enjoy deceptive feelings of comfort and security, such a civilization is a failed project / project not serving its own purpose.

I am not writing all these lines to suggest that sedentary civilizations are failed or insignificant projects. Many outstanding sedentary civilizations like Etruscans, Romans, the ancient Chinese, ancient Greeks, the Aztecs of Mesoamerica forced the limits of human mind and innovated and made inventions that could be called genius. What is problematic is that many established notions inside traditional history end up dysfunctional and insufficient from the standpoint of the dignity, comfort and happiness of humans and cannot properly assess many changes taking place in our day, which I think are anti-human. If the humans inside the sedentary civilization today, which is in the process of collapse, are to save themselves from its pangs, they have to embrace values like gallantry-integrity, honoring one’s promise, sacrifice, protection and bonding, cooperation, common sense, physical and mental strength, all of which are the products of the steppe civilizations. Otherwise, the future generations will be living with virtual shackles knit all around their bodies; in a grey, grim world devoid of aesthetics and refined pleasure controlled by the law of oligarchy, a world where human dignity no longer exists and it is and has been made impossible to access nature. If any oligarchy could make you believe that you are civilized and chosen because you comply with the written and virtual laws made in line with their own ends, one day they will make those laws so stringent you would feel as if you were being asphyxiated and no longer have the opportunity to live a dignified life.

If we go back to the topic of the origins of the Huns of Central Asia, it wouldn’t be a fallacy in logical terms to consider them a Turkic people although we know they were a conglomeration of different ethnicities. If, in terms of historical continuity, we are to determine an ancestral nation for the Göktürks ( also known as the Celestial Turks ), the first people in history who appeared with the name of Turk, the Xiongnu would be the most reasonable candidate. The Turkish Land Forces also consider 209 BC the date of their establishment, when Modu Chanyu created a big, disciplined army uniting the tribes scattered across Inner Asia. During the following years, this army ravaged China, which was a sedentary civilization, and the state forged by it became the first mayor steppe empire in history.

It was also through some practices that could be deemed brutal that Modu Chanyu was able to forge this great empire. One of the most outstanding novelties introduced by Modu was an instrument of war called the whistling arrow. It was the arrow used by Modu himself and an instrument with an object on either tip that produced a strong frictional sound when it came into contact with air upon being shot. The troops commanded by Modu had to shoot towards the sound as soon as they heard it. If any soldier failed to do this, they were immediately killed on the spot. Modu introduced this method to guarantee his soldiers’ loyalty and render them agile and swift during battles. Legend has it that once he shot the whistling arrow towards his horse and then his favorite consort and had the hesitant soldiers killed immediately. It was he who made the scattered peoples of the steppe into disciplined troops by institutionalizing the decimal army system and introduced political organization, a feat achieved never before in the history of the steppe. The organization of the Turkish army today does not exactly reflect the system created by Modu, but the military terms such as onbaşı ( literally the commander of ten soldiers ), yüzbaşı ( literally the commander of a hundred soldiers ) and tümen ( a unit of 10.000 soldiers ) used in Turkish today are the products of Modu’s military organization.

Modu also introduced an army almost totally composed of cavalry. This cavalry could put the enemy to flight within a zilch of time when they combined their superior horsemanship with unique talents of archery. This army of cavalry was a world first. There was a cavalry unit in some armies at that time, but it was just a tiny part of them. The Chinese army at that time, composed of infantry, couldn’t resist the cavalry of Modu. Modu also perfected the Turkish Wolf Trap ( Crescent ) tactic, which involved feigning a retreat and surrounding the enemy from both flanks, which rendered it much easier to defeat the big Chinese armies of the time. Being the mythic ancestor of Turks, the wolf inspired the battle tactic of the steppe since it finishes off its prey upon attracting it into a trap and Turks have used this tactic many times in the battlefield throughout history.

The great Khanate of the Golden Horde, established by Batu Khan and Turkicized shortly after, was one of the greatest political powers of the Middle Ages and made many contributions to the Russian history and culture. The khanate used to call itself Uluğ Ulus, which meant noble state / nation. It levied taxes on the Russian principalities, indicating the Russian princes were dependent on the Horde for power and dominance. As the result of the Horde strongly supporting the Muscovite princes, the Principality of Muscovy gained power in time and united the other principalities under its rule, which meant the birth of the country we call Russia today. Census and collection of taxes passed from the Horde to the Russians. The Horde also exempted the Russian Orthodox Church from taxes, which played a pivotal role in the birth of the united Russia.

There is no consensus regarding where the expression Golden Horde originated from. The Mongolian rulers used to possess big, ostentatious tents with golden embroidery. This could have been a source of inspiration for the name of the khanate. Yellow, which is the colour of gold, also represented the central zone of the empire, thought to be the most resilient territory within it, in the color symbolism of the steppe civilizations. As we pointed out before, the khanate didn’t call itself the Golden Horde. This expression became common later, in particular inside the Russian sources. In Uluğ Ulus, the authentic name of the knanate, the word uluğ meant noble in old Turkic. The word ordu, the origin of the word horde, is considered to be an extremely ancient word coming down to us from Proto-Turkic. It appears in the form of orda in Mongolian.

Since Russians and other Europeans considered Mongolian and Turkic military campaigns barbaric, the word ordu passed into their languages bearing the meanings of a ( disordered ), ( threatening ) and ( barbarous ) group of people. We encounter the word in the form of орда ( orda ) in Russian, while horda is the form it has taken in Czech, Polish, Spanish, Portuguese and Hungarian. We could observe it in the form of horde in English and French. We could come across such sentences as the ones written below in English and Spanish:

• A horde of people are waiting outside to see the singer leave the concert hall.
• El héroe valiente luchaba contra una horda de salvajes con la espada en la mano. ( The brave hero was fighting a horde of savages with the sword in his hand. )

In a nutshell, ordu is one of the most ancient words in Turkic languages and made its way into a range of languages, albeit with different meanings. Although we do not see many battles in our day, I think psychological warfare is an outstanding phenomenon of our time. As such, it is my opinion that for the purpose of understanding the world in a much better light, it is essential the concepts of barbarity and civilization be assessed with more depth and in a more flexible manner while considering the human societies in the past and today.