The Turkish word for God began as the steppe name for the sky
When a Turkish speaker today says Tanrı, meaning God, they are echoing Tengri, the heavenly deity of the Eurasian steppe. Khans claimed his mandate, the Huns carried his worship toward Europe, and Chinese chroniclers recorded his name as early as the 4th century BC among the Xiongnu.
Tengri was the supreme sky god of Turkic, Mongolic, Yeniseian and other nomadic peoples: eternal, the source of life and the judge of all. Mongolian belief held that his will could override its usual laws and send a chosen person to earth. The wider faith, known as Tengrism, centres on the Sky Father and the Earth Mother, Umay, and mixes ancestor veneration, shamanism, animism and totemism.
The name is old and much debated. Chinese annals transcribe it as Cheng-li when describing Xiongnu religion, and the Old Turkic form Teŋri appears in the 8th-century Orkhon inscriptions. Most assume it first meant sky. Andrey Kononov proposed it fused words for morning and evening, the whole daily sky; the linguist Stefan Georg suggests a borrowing from Proto-Yeniseian for high. An older idea connecting it with Chinese tian, sky, looks unlikely given modern reconstructions of Old Chinese sounds. Relatives survive in Mongolian tenger, sky, and Bulgarian Tangra.
Politics ran through the cult. For the Göktürks he was the god of the Turks, and their khans ruled as his sons and earthly representatives, carrying titles that signalled a heavenly blessing called kut. Between the 6th and 9th centuries Tengri was the leading deity of the steppe ruling classes among Turks, Mongols and Hungarians. His standing slipped when the Uighur khagans made Manichaeism their state religion in the 8th century.
Early Turks seem to have imagined tengri as heaven itself, or the will governing it, before it became a personal god, a shift that came as they encountered other religions. In the developed pantheon he created everything, commanded lesser spirits, and fathered the sun and moon. Scholars compare him to the reconstructed Indo-European sky god Dyeus, and Amy Chua renders his name as the Eternal Blue Sky.
Source: Tengri
