Blue Turks built the first pan-steppe Turkic khaganate
The Göktürks—Türük Bodun, Celestial or Blue Turks—were Inner Asian Turkic people who, under Bumin Qaghan (d. 552) and his heirs, forged the first expansive Turkic khaganate across the medieval steppe. Chinese sources called them Tūjué; neighbours wrote Türük in many scripts.
The dynasty behind the Göktürks, the Ashina clan, first appears in 439. According to the Book of Sui, on 18 October that year Emperor Taiwu of Northern Wei toppled Juqu Mujian of the Northern Liang in eastern Gansu, and 500 Ashina households fled north-west to the Rouran Khaganate near Gaochang. A little over a century later, under Bumin Qaghan, who died in 552, and his sons, these refugees replaced the Rouran as the dominant power of Inner Asia and founded the First Turkic Khaganate, one of the nomadic states that set the long-term geography, culture and beliefs of Turkic peoples.
Their name was narrower than it sounds today. The Göktürks applied Türk only to themselves, their subjects and their offshoots; the Uyghurs, Tiele and Kyrgyz were not counted, and the Orkhon inscriptions withhold the label from the Toquz Oghuz and Yenisei Kyrgyz. The Uyghurs returned the favour, calling themselves Uyghurs and casting the Türks as hostile foreigners. Chinese historians, by contrast, wrote the Khazars' name with the same Tūjué characters, a hint that the Khazars carried the Göktürk tradition forward.
What Türk originally meant is disputed. One view derives it from an Old Turkic word for created or born. The American Heritage Dictionary gives strong, a reading Gerhard Doerfer backs, but Gerard Clauson argued the word was never used that way and meant the peak of ripeness, as of fruit or of a person in vigorous youth. Hakan Aydemir proposed in 2022 that it first meant gathered or confederated, from a root for heaping up.
The Gök prefix is just as slippery. It is a modern Turkish reading of Kök, taken as sky, but with only one attestation scholars split between great and blue. Blue fits a Central Asian colour scheme in which it marks the east, and the clan name Ashina may itself come from a Khotanese Saka word for deep blue. Chinese writers explained Tūjué as combat helmet, after the helmet-like Altai Mountains where the people lived; Róna-Tas suggested a Saka word for lid behind that story, though Peter Golden wants more evidence.
Source: Göktürks
