Turkic expansion

Turkic migration refers to the expansion of the Turkic tribes in Europe and the Middle East, between the 6th and 11th centuries. The region of origin of the Turks is East Central Asia, Xinjiang, Mongolia and Siberia.

Certainly identified Turkic tribes were known by the 6th century and by the 10th century most of Central Asia was settled by Turkic tribes. The Seljuq dynasty invaded Anatolia starting in the 11th century, ultimately resulting in permanent Turkic settlement there. Meanwhile, other Turkic tribes either ultimately formed independent nations, such as Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan or formed enclaves within other nations, such as Chuvashia. Turkic peoples also survived in their original range, such as the Uyghurs in China and the Sakha Republic of Siberia, as well as in other scattered places of the Far East and Central Asia.

The earliest documented Turkic peoples appear as nomadic tribes on the plains of the Far East north of the Great Wall of China, which was constructed as a fortified border essentially between Han dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE) China (though started earlier) and the Xiongnu.

The population ancestral to the Turks is thought to have included the Xiongnu of Mongolia or along the upper Yenisei in Siberia (the area of the contemporary Tuvan language), known from historical sources. The Han chronicle of the Xiongnu, included in the Records of the Grand Historian of the second century BCE, traces a legendary history of them back a thousand years before the Han to a legendary ancestor, Chunwei, a supposed descendant of the Chinese rulers of the Xia dynasty (c. 2070 – c. 1600 BCE). Chunwei lived among the "Mountain Barbarians" Xianyun or Hunzhu. Xianyun and Hunzhu's names may connect them to the Turkic people, who later were said to have been iron-workers and to have kept a national shrine in a mountain cave in Mongolia.

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