Histories relating to Turkish-speaking peoples are too superficial, scanty, controversial, and often downright prejudiced. (When I considered present histories, I observed that) there was something terribly wrong, for example, in the way Turkish-speaking peoples under the Hunnish Attila came suddenly unto the European stage, out of nowhere, with full political power and activity, dominated Europe and challenged Rome, the world’s greatest power at that time. It was indeed too sudden, without any historical background and preparation. My logic and reason did not accept the theory of the historians that these Huns came from Mongolia, travelling over three thousand miles, crossing many mountain chains, many large rivers, and on the road, many alien kingdoms of Central Asia assumed to be all Indo-Iranian or even Indo-European, and replaced the Sakas and Scythians they conquered. Logic and reason dictated that this whole Hunnish affair had to be born and created locally within the Russian Steppes, and by the local people, which meant that the Huns did not replace the Scythians; they had to be the Scythians themselves.

Then too, there was something wrong in the way other Turkish political powers developed full-blossomed during the last sixteen hundred years and dominated Eurasia including Central Asia, India, Transcaucasus, Iran and Asia Minor. The "nomad theory" of the historians assumed that all Turkish kingdoms and empires were ‘transient’; Turks were always nomads, trespassers, ruling other people as they handled their sheep, cattle and horses. Turk was always an alien in his own country. Present histories tell us that, today, out of all major nations of Europe, Asia, and the Near East, only the Turks have been the late comers, being in Central Asia only after the eighth century A.D., and in Asia Minor only for about 900 years or less than a millennium, since the Battle of Malazgirt in 1071. But, all the other nations seem to have lived in their present geography from time immemorial. In the known historical ages, Germans, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, Gauls, Latins, Spaniards, Slavs, Greeks in Europe; Hindus, Chinese in Asia; Persians, Armenians, Georgians, Arabs, Hebrews, Egyptians in the Middle East; all lived in or about their present geography. Only the Turks have created an anomalous picture.

A second historical anomaly which I believed to be related to the first is created by the so-called 'lost languages', a phenomenon that, from the point of 'continuity in history,’ was to me unacceptable or even impossible. We can see a reasonable continuity in all major languages, Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Anglo-German, Persian, Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish, as well as in such minor languages as Albanian, Georgian, and Armenian. All have basically preserved their ancient characteristics with changes only in the amount of loanwords borrowed from friendly or conquering nations who might have been akin or completely foreign to them. Lost languages of significance were those of such ancient peoples as the Sumerians, Elamites, Medes, Scythians, Hittites (Hattians), Phrygians, Lydians, Trojans, Etruscans, and Arameans, all great nations of their times, some discovering and creating the civilization itself and some making major contributions to the arts and cultures that established the foundations of Greek renaissance, and through it, made possible our present civilizations. Languages of many of these nations still lived in Strabo’s age which also coincided with the beginning of the Christian calendar. Why then, their languages should be lost while the languages of even the minor nations lived, nations who were always at the prey of these major powers, and who were invaded, slaughtered or enslaved many times during their long history? Why these small nations were not wiped out of the face of the earth as easily as, for example, the great Sumerians who, in the words of the ancient chronicler, spoke ‘the language of the whole earth?’ [ Gen. 11.1-2 (The Holy Scriptures, The Jewish Publication Society of America, Philadelphia, 1963) ]. Thus, logic will rule again that these ancient languages could not possibly die out if normal historical process and continuity had to be preserved; they should have lived and continued up to the present time in some form or dialect recognizable to us.

... Here, our field of study is the ‘lost languages’ themselves, which were generally non-Semitic, non-Indo-European, and also agglutinative. Many of the lost languages meeting these conditions, such as Sumerian, Elamite, Etruscan, Urartian, and Hurrian, branded vaguely ‘Asian’ - as if there was only a single language group in that continent-, had to be related to the Ural-Altaic group of which Turkish is the only major language spoken today in Eurasia. Thus, the elimination of the two anomalies from the history books depended on the proof that these lost languages, at least some of them, were akin to Turkish in some form or dialect...

The great void left by the ‘lost languages’ had to be filled only by a language that had to be one of the three major tongues, Indo-European, Semitic, or Turanian; and since the majority of the lost languages were neither Indo-European nor Semitic they had to be Turanian, that is, Turkish. Through my deciphering process, a global distribution and development of the Turkish languages during the last five thousand years of man’s history has been established and the missing links in the long chain of Turkish history, believed by some to contain only sixteen links from the Huns to the present Turkish Republic in Anatolia, are found.

The coming chapters, unfolding indirectly the new ancient history of the Turkish-speaking peoples through their ‘lost’ languages will also show that the homeland of thc Proto-Turks, at least at the beginning of the recorded historical age 5000 years ago, was within the Asia Minor-Transcaucasia- Mesopotamia triangle. Cultural evidence pushes back this history to the seventh millennium B.C. However, these evidences should not be taken to mean that Turkish-speaking peoples did not live in other parts of Europe and Asia. We know the fact that the civilization of man certainly spread from west to east and that some of the essence of the Sumeric civilization, for example, reached China (Shang civilization) more than a thousand years later. [ Ernst Diez, The Ancient Worlds of Asia, Putnam’s, New York, 1961 (DiAWOA), P. 193 ]

... Today, two systems of thought exist amongst the enlightened Turks of Anatolia. First group claims an ‘Asian root’ for all Turks; and they seem to be quite right within the historical knowledge found at present in the history books and encyclopedias. Opposing this view, a second smaller group is in search to contain the Anatolian Turks within a ‘Mediterranean civilization’ to which they must belong because of racial and cultural characteristics of Anatolia, their home for the last thousand years... The question of "what is the real truth?" can now be answered by those who carefully follow the historical development of Turkish languages studied in this work. Indeed, I have proven that the culture of 6300 B.C. Anatolia as discovered at Çatal Hüyük by archaeologist James Mellaart is Turkish, and since this almost 8300 years old culture was not created in a day, we can easily talk of a ‘Ten Thousand Years of the Turks’ from the point of Turkish cultural history. The true history, that is, literary history goes back to 5000 years with the discovery of writing by the Sumerians who, as we will see spoke definitely a Turkish dialect. While Turkish-speaking peoples of an advanced culture lived in Asia Minor nearly ten thousand years ago, we do not have any similar archaeological evidence in greater Asia at corresponding time. Thus we can claim that Anatolia was the first home of the Turks.

The Mediterranean culture was not created solely by the Greeks and Romans but more so by these ancient Turkish-speaking peoples. And, the Turks of today can now truly consider themselves pure and native Anatolians without reservation... On the other side, countless brethren nations, settled at unknown times in such regions as the Balkans, Russia, Trans-Caucasus, Central Asia, Mongolia: the Bejens (Pecheneks), Gagaghuz (Gagaguz), Azerbayjanians, Crimeans, Turcomans (Türkmens), Uighurs, Kirghiz, Uzbeks, Kazaks, Yakuts, have been rooted well in their own geographies. We must think it normal that as they went East, Turkish-speaking nations have been ‘Tartarized’ by the mixture of Mongolian strain of the Chinese, the most crowded nation of Asia, whom they kept under subjection for long periods in history. Thus, some became slightly Mongoloid in features. One can no longer consider scientific such propaganda lies as told by some historians about the Kirghiz Turks: “You Kirghiz were in the old days of European stock (of white, Caucasian race), but became Asian (Mongoloid) in the East as you mixed with the Turks". On the contrary, an unprejudiced mind could easily see that, the Turks settling in large numbers in Eurasia have actually saved the Europeans themselves from the same ‘Tartarization’ that they went through in some degree. In spite of that, today, the Mongoloid strain among the Russians and the Poles are more widespread than that appearing among the Anatolian Turks.

Turcologists generally use the term ‘Turkish’ solely for the language of the Turkish Republic of Anatolia, and ‘Turkic’ for other Turkish dialects such as Tatar, Kirghiz, Uzbeg, Uighur, etc. These ‘other Turks’ could easily argue that they have more right to the title Turkish (‘Türk’) than we the Anatolians on the basis that the great eleventh-century linguist Mahmud Kashgari specifically called his own language and nation ‘Turkish’ and called ours ‘Oghuz.’ However, he used the term ‘Türk’ “Turkish” also in a general sense for all Turkish nations and their dialects. So I have used the phrase “Turkish” all-inclusive in a historical sense. Again, the phrase ‘Ural-Altaic’, have been employed for all agglutinated languages having relatively a common grammar. In a historical sense, however, involving several millenniums, the Turkish languages have not changed very much in their basic structures. Even the border-line languages, such as Hungarian and Finnish (two extreme cases) which have borrowed large amounts of foreign words from neighboring nations to swell their vocabulary, have preserved the character, the structure, and the grammar, all undoubtedly Turkish, of their basic languages. Present author, again in the historic sense, prefers to classify them as Turkish because the people that speak them ‘think in Turkish’ in spite of dialectic variations and in spite of all the alien words in their languages. We will see this much better when we go deeply into historical ages where we will discover the flowering of these languages in an all embracing forest of Turkish-speaking nations.

We will further discover that such languages as the 13^th-century Mongol ‘Moğol’ and present Chuvash ‘Çuvaş’ are not independent Ural-Altaic languages but are essentially Turkish in their structure and vocabulary. While doing this, we will discover a Turkish-speaking world of Marco Polo, some of whose words and expressions are explained in this work for the first time.

This research on the ancient Turkish languages wipes out the long accepted ‘nomad’ theory on the Turks, which theory was absurd to begin with. Even for the Oghuz Turks who were generally accepted to have formed true nomadic societies, eleventh-century encyclopedist Mahmud Kashgari reports five Oghuz cities in the region of Transoxiana. Other, non-Oghuz, Turkish cities reported by him amount to forty five in Central Asia, not counting many cities in Khorasan and Iran within the Seljuk Empire, south of the Oxus river. Certainly, some Turkish nomad groups existed side by side with settled Turkish societies. And, these nomads were not the weakness but, on the contrary, the very strength of the settled Turkish civilizations along their long history. The pure nomadic societies, pure in language as well as in manly and human attributes, often moved in, sometimes with bloody efforts, into the tired, spent kingdoms to provide them with a new blood, giving them new momentum, setting up new dynasties, such as the Seljuks (‘Kınık’ Oghuz Turks) did for the Ghaznawid Empire, and the Ottomans (‘Kayığ’ Oghuz Turks) for the Seljuk Empire.

The men and women of Anatolia who will read this book will find their true identity’ which their past and present thinkers have been seeking at least for the last five hundred years, and will learn that they are the true inheritors of the world’s first great cultures and civilizations that flowered on the soil on which they live today...

This work is divided into four parts. The first part discusses and rediscovers the Turkish languages and civilizations of the last thirteen hundred years, and is intended to prepare the reader for the main subject which covers deciphering of many lost languages of the ancient past (Part II). A later part of the work discusses the effects of ancient Turkish dialects on other language groups including Indo-European and Semitic languages (Part III). Final chapter (Part IV) is devoted to analysis and decipherment of ancient geographic names. The work ends with the Epilogue.

An appendix added at the end of the book summarizes some of our contribution to thc understanding of the ancient alphabets, contains a new table, and gives equivalent phonetic values of critical letters in the alphabets and in Turkish dialects.
 

Copyright 1996, 864 Pages, 38 Illustrations, 16 x 22.5 cm. in actual size, 1st grade paper, hardcover, ISBN 975-96037-0-5

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