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The Eviction by Jacob Lawrence. American, 1935 CE.

Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin.

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Gonna see if this is a worthwhile read.

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Ring that once belonged to Søren Kierkegaard, who had given it to his fiancée Regine Olsen. He reclaimed the ring in 1841 after they broke up. Denmark, 1841-1855 CE.

Museum of Copenhagen-Københavns Museum

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Cauldron by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahid. Iran, 1163 CE.

The State Hermitage Museum, Russia.

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Page from the Khamsa (Five Epic Poems). Artist unknown. Original author, Nizami Ganjavi, 1141–1209. Artwork, likely 1584 CE. Iran.

Denver Art Museum.

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Pouring Tea by Edmund C. Tarbell. American, 1916-1920 CE.

Oklahoma City Museum of Art.

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Cogged Well Wheel (Al-Manjur). Northern Oman, 20th Century CE.

Oman National Museum.

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I’m an American, born and raised, but I cannot support this war in Iran. The more America gets involved the more fascist and imperial we’re gonna look. To any of my followers who may be of Iranian, Palestinian or other Middle Eastern descent I wish to send my deepest regret and apologies. I’m embarrassed at America’s growing involvement in this war. I have nothing but love and admiration for Persian history so this shames me to my core.

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The First Turkic Khaganate, 576 CE. Image credit to Ktrinko on Wikimedia Commons.

Göktürks depicted in Mongolia, 6th-8th Century CE. Source https://depts.washington.edu/silkroad/museums/ubhist/ubhist15a.jpg

The origin of Turkic culture is as mysterious as the lands from whence they came from. Due to the very nature of nomadic peoples it can be difficult to get concrete answers as to their origin. At times Turkic speaking peoples lived in what is now Mongolia. In others they shared borders with Korea, China, Armenia and the Middle East.

They migrated as far as Eastern Europe and caused other nomadic cultures to migrate as well. They roamed the steppes of Asia during the birth of ancient China, the fall of the Western Romans, and the rise of the East Romans(Byzantines). Their culture can be difficult to pin down simply due to how nomadic governance functioned. At times Turkic speaking peoples would united into shared confederations. In other times their federations would shatter into countless splintered tribes. On rare occasion they would incorporate non Turkic nomadic tribes into their ranks, or the ancestral tongues of the Turkic language would simply be used as a language for trade, making it difficult still to track down what was part of a shared Turkic empire and what was simply an outside peoples looking inward.

Keep in mind nomadic horse cultures had a habit worldwide of incorporating other horse-peoples into their ranks. Fast forward a thousand years and the Mongolians did the same thing, absorbing Turkic speaking peoples into their empire from the Golden Horde all the way to the Ilkhanids. The confederation of Turkic tribes that made up the Göktürks would have likely behaved in a similar manner.

That tangent aside let us discuss the Göktürks. As mentioned earlier there is some semantic debate about whether the first Göktürk Khaganate was actually an empire or rather more akin to a confederacy of tribes. There is precedent for both, seeing as nomadic cultures in later centuries flip-flopped from federation to empire. Regardless the Göktürks are to most scholars credited with the formation of the First Turkic Khaganate.

From the 500s to 700s CE the First Turkic Khaganate united various Turkic speaking peoples into an alliance that made them a threat to their more urbanized neighbors. China and Persia both had troubles with this "horde" of wild horsemen. Despite their infamous reputation they were not afraid of trade when it suited them. They had good relations with the ancestral kingdom of modern day Korea, the Goguryeo. Various tribes in Bactria were brought under their heel. When they weren't fighting China they were receiving Buddhist missionaries from them. They also received many Manichean and Nestorian missionaries.

Despite their multiculturality they typically were adamant believers in Tengri, the leader of their nomadic pantheon who later found himself a member of the Mongolian pantheon. They were among the first in written history to refer to themselves as some variant of the word "Turk". Names such as KökTürk, Kök-Türks, Kök türü̲k̲, Köktürkler, and Tujue are among the many earlier names given to these nomads going back as early as the 500s in Chinese writings and orkhon script.

Under the leadership of pseudo-mythical Bumin Khan they overthrew another nomadic peoples known as the Xiongu around modern day Mongolia and Central Asia and established what is considered the First Turkic Khaganate around 552 CE. They quickly established trade routes that stretched from the Middle East to the borders of Korea.

There is some belief that orkhon script, the writing system of the Göktürks, descended directly from cave markings from thousands of years prior to the empire's formation. While this is a hotly debated and unproven theory it is among the most fascinating potential candidates for the script's origins. (Şaban Taş).

Orkhon table: Thomsen, Vilhelm. Inscriptions de l’Orkhon déchiffrées, Suomalais-ugrilainen seura, Helsinki Toimituksia, no. 5 Helsingfors: La société de literature Finnoise (1893).

Photo credit to Vilhelm Thomsen on Wikimedia Commons.

While the Göktürks(First Turkic Khaganate) remained a threat to urbanized China for a few centuries its very loose nature was eventually its undoing. The Khaganate kept only rudimentary control of its many tribes, usually only banding together for conquest or defense against its more established neighbors. A civil war in the 580s and early 600s caused the empire to split in half into a Western and Eastern empire. The Göktürks fought against other Turkic speaking peoples such as the Huns, Khazars, and Uyghurs. For a short time they gave the Byzantines aid against its Sassanian Persian rival. But the civil war permanently weakened the Turks to the point that they became easy prey to their neighbors.

Through the remaining centuries the two remaining halves, the Western and Eastern empires, became victim to further civil infighting, Chinese invasion, and ironically war with their cousins the Uyghurs that did them in. The Turks that remained were either absorbed into enemy empires or fled outward. Descendants of this empire, the Oghuz, formed a new federation of their own. Descendants of the Oghuz went westward for trade, raiding, and mercenary work within the Arab and Persian world. In the 700s the survivors of this nomadic ethnic group came into contact with Islam and Christianity.

The Oghuz later gave birth to the Seljuks who conquered Iran as a launchpad into Anatolia. The Seljuks formed the Sultanate of Rum(Rome) in Anatolia much to the detriment of the Byzantine empire in 1071 CE. These Turks combined their own Turkic culture with Persian and Arabic. While the Seljuks themselves eventually dissolved their descendants the Ottomans survived well into the modern world and their child, Turkiye/Turkey, survives to this day.

Sources:

Şaban Taş. (n.d.). Historical Documents on the Origin of the Gokturk Alphabet. https://openaccess.yeditepe.edu.tr/yayinaea/%C5%9Eaban%20Ta%C5%9F_65d462c34436f.pdf

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Alebrije by the Linares Family. Mexico, 1970s CE.

San Antonio Museum of Art.

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Die Grüne Frauen [The Green Women] by Wassily Kandinsky. Russian, 1907 CE.

Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin.

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Vase in the Shape of a Duck. Egyptian, 3rd to 2nd Century BCE.

The Walters Art Museum.

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Argenteus of Constantius I Chlorus (250-306 CE), minted at Antioch, 294-295. The argenteus was a silver coin introduced by Diocletian in a bid to reform the currency and combat rampant inflation that had afflicted the Empire throughout the third century.

This coin is meant to promote the harmony of the Tetrarchy, the system put in place by Diocletian to manage the Empire. Two senior emperors with the title "Augustus" were to rule the two halves of the Empire, Diocletian in the East and his junior colleague Maximian in the West. Each man had a "Caesar" intended to succeed him, Galerius (East) and Constantius (West). The reverse of the coin depicts the four Tetrarchs sacrificing jointly, with the inscription VICTORIAE SARMATICAE.

Given responsibility over Gaul, Britain, and possibly Spain as well, with his capital at Augusta Treverorum (modern-day Trier, Germany), Constantius successfully put down the usurper Carausius and waged war against various Germanic tribes. During the "Great Persecution" of Christians promoted by Diocletian and Galerius beginning in 303, he took only desultory action, which would later win him praise from ecclesiastical historians such as Eusebius of Caesarea, some of whom went so far as to claim him as a crypto-Christian.

When Diocletian abdicated in 305 and forced Maximian to follow suit, Constantius became Augustus in the West. He died the next year at Eboracum (modern-day York, England, UK), while campaigning against the Picts. His troops ignored his "Caesar," Severus, and acclaimed his son Constantine as Augustus, beginning a train of events that would lead to momentous political, social, and religious changes in the Empire.

Photo credit: Classical Numismatic Group, Inc. http://www.cngcoins.com | Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported

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Jahangir hunting lions from an elephant. India, 1610 CE.

The Aga Khan Museum.

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effervescent

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Crucifix with Mourning Virgin and St. John the Evangelist. Florentine, Italy. 1270-1290 CE.

The Walters Art Museum.

Weirdest six-pack I’ve ever seen.

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Jewish paper amulet for a successful new year, possibly from Iraqi Kurdistan, 19th century