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- Convenor:
-
Aybike Tezel
(Nazarbayev University)
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- Chair:
-
Ulan Bigozhin
(Nazarbayev University)
- Discussant:
-
Ablet Kamalov
(University Turan)
- Format:
- Panel
- Theme:
- History
Abstract
How did traditions of political authority emerge, circulate, and evolve across the Eurasian steppe? This panel brings together scholars working with textual sources, material culture, economic history, and genetic evidence to explore how power, governance and imperial institutions were organized in the steppe polities from the early Inner Asian empires to the Mongol successor states.
The panel is unified by a shared set of questions: What institutional forms did steppe polities develop, and how were these transmitted or adapted in later empires? How did rulers project and materialize political authority beyond the written record? What economic systems sustained political power on the steppe? And how do genealogical and demographic evidence reshape our understanding of political continuity and collective identity?
Panel participants address these questions through different bodies of evidence and historical contexts. One paper uses Chinese historical sources to analyze the administrative structure of the Rou-ran Qaghanate and its place within the political landscape of the early steppe world. A second paper turns to the Western Türk Qaghanate and explores how sovereignty and political authority can be approached through material evidence [in Kazakh]. A third contribution examines the political economies of Turkic confederations in the ninth and tenth centuries and explores how ecology, exchange networks, and resource mobilization influenced the organization of political power on the steppe. The fourth paper analyzes the tribal histories of the Golden Horde alongside recent genetic research on Kazakh populations to reconsider questions of lineage and identity.
By placing these diverse sources and historical cases in conversation, the panel highlights the methodological range required to study the political history of the Eurasian steppe. Together, the papers offer a historically grounded perspective on a complex landscape of political practices marked by continuity, adaptation, and rupture and challenge the tendency to treat steppe polities as isolated or episodic phenomena.
Accepted papers
Abstract
The history of the Eurasian steppes is often narrated through a sequence of great empires that emerge from political fragmentation, consolidate authority across vast territories, and eventually collapse. Steppe empires such as the Xiongnu, the Türk Qaghanate, and the Mongol Empire are therefore treated as formative moments in the history of the region, credited with reshaping its political, cultural, and demographic landscape. The periods between them, however, are often cast as transitional or insignificant. One of the most prominent of these intervals lies between the fall of the Xiongnu and the rise of the Türk Qaghanate. At the center of this period stands the Rou-ran Qaghanate. The Rou-ran dominated the Mongolian Plateau from the late fourth to the mid-sixth centuries and ruled a vast territory extending from parts of present-day Kazakhstan and southern Siberia to the oasis states of the Tarim Basin. Despite the scale of their power and territorial reach, the Rou-ran remain marginal in historical narratives of the region. In this talk, I make a historiographical intervention by situating the Rou-ran as a constitutive phase in the formation of steppe imperial traditions. I argue that they formed a crucial link in a longer history of institutional transmission and transformation across Inner Asia. To make this case, I examine how the Rou-ran’s political organization, administrative and institutional structures, cultural practices, and diplomatic networks shaped the broader Inner Asian landscape. I draw on Chinese official histories and argue that the Rou-ran’s marginalization in the historiography is a product of narratives of legitimacy, succession, and imperial inheritance through which Inner Asian political history has been reconstructed. Recovering their place in that history requires us to rethink where we locate the generative moments of Eurasian statecraft.
Abstract
Political authority in Central Asia during the first millennium CE was often in the hands of nomadic pastoral groups. Large tribal confederations such as the Scythian-Saka, Yuezhi, Xiongnu, Wusun, and Kangju established their supremacy over sedentary oasis states, yet their influence on sedentary populations was not particularly strong, their relations largely limited to the collection of tribute, with administration conducted by local dynasties or ruling houses of nomadic origin that had gradually integrated among their subjects. I argue that the Western Türk Qaghanate (568-740) marked a significant departure from this pattern. Unlike earlier nomadic political formations, the Türk Qaghanate did not merely establish political supremacy over sedentary regions but penetrated deeply into their territories. The Western Türk Qaghanate in particular, the western wing of the Türk imperial structure, governed territories inhabited by both nomadic pastoralists and sedentary agricultural communities and introduced a system of governance distinct from that of earlier nomadic empires. Rather than ruling through local vassals, its rulers appointed their own representatives in oasis centers including Chach, Otrar, Ferghana, Bukhara, Tokharistan, and Kabul, often members of the Ashina dynasty or other Turkic lineages. I examine how this situation is reflected not only in written sources of the period, preserved in Chinese, Sogdian, Bactrian, Old Turkic, and other languages, but above all in material evidence from the same era. Drawing on coins, seals, palace murals, and various objects associated with authority and belief, I show that Turkic elements become increasingly prominent across the sedentary zones the Qaghanate governed. I demonstrate that the principal rulers of the Western Türk Qaghanate minted their own coins in the Chach oasis bearing their names and titles, the presence of Tardu Qaghan and Tun Yabghu Qaghan on such coins providing vivid examples, and that local representatives likewise issued coins and seals bearing Old Turkic titles and tamghas, thereby emphasizing the legitimacy of their authority in the sedentary oasis regions. The frequent depiction of Turkic representatives in palace wall paintings at Afrasiab, Varakhsha, Shahristan, and Panjikent, read alongside numismatic and written evidence, allows me to reconstruct how the Western Türk Qaghanate projected and legitimized political authority across a diverse imperial landscape in which nomadic and sedentary traditions of sovereignty were brought into direct and productive tension.
Abstract
The Uyghur empire introduced a new hybrid economic system into the history of Inner Asian empires by synthesizing agricultural and urban economies with the well-known pastoralist production of earlier empires, such as the Türks and Xiongnu. Meanwhile, English-language scholarship remains unclear as to how these institutional changes impacted later states like the Oghuz or the Qarakhanids. This paper addresses this problem with an analysis of the political economies of four Turkic confederations (the Oghuz, Qarluq, Kimak, and Qirghiz) in the ninth and tenth centuries. Textual, archaeological, and paleoclimatic data reveal interactions between ecologies and resource mobilization that influenced the organization of political power and inter-confederation violence. First, it argues that the hybrid economic system of the Uyghur empire was used by these four confederations. Second, volcano-driven climatic disturbances in the ninth century intensified debates over rain magic, inter-confederation violence, and enslavement. This paper demonstrates how ecological history helps reinterpret Inner Asian imperial political history.
Abstract
The tribal history of the Kazakh Khanate and its antecedents is a historical problem which is very far from having found a consensus. There are several complicating factors. The very first is the confusion over the meaning of the terms “White Horde” (Aq orda) and “Blue Horde” (Kök orda). The second is the blind eye which is turned to the sources and scholarship regarding the tribal composition of the Golden Horde (13th-14th centuries) and the Later Golden Horde (15th-8th centuries). The third is the question of the origin and tribal composition of the Kazakh Khanate. A fourth is the question of how these tribal formations developed. The fifth and final one is the more recent question of the tribal question of the Kazakh tribes of the Lesser Horde, Middle Horde, and Greater Horde. Each one of these questions has underlying it a serious of a priori questions and theoretical assumptions.
It has been shown that the leading “ruling tribes” participating in the governance of the “White Horde” (Aq orda) or western part of the Golden Horde (ulus of Jochi/Coçi~Joshy) consisted of the Qongrat, Qıyat, Mangıt, and Sicivut. On the other hand, it has been shown that the “ruling tribes” of the Khanates of Kazan and Crimea in the Later Golden Horde consisted of the şirin, Barın, Arğın, and Qıpçaq. It is likely that this is to be explained by the demographic collapse of the sedentary centers of the White Horde during the time of the Black Death. This begs the question of how to situate the Kazakh Khanate in relation to the populations of the Golden Horde and the Later Golden Horde.
The paper considers the data in recent article on the genetic background of the individuals found in the so-called “Mausoleum of Joshy Khan” in Ulytau, Kazakhstan (Askapuli et al. 2026) and another article discussing the “founder effect” among the Arğın (Zhabagin et al. 2016) to: 1) compare the tribal formations of the Golden Horde and Later Golden Horde with the information for the population of the Kazakh Khanate; 2) consider the implications of the “founder effect” on the rise of the tribes in the Kazakh Khanate; and 3) consider what the effect of depopulation from the Black Death might have been on this process.