Tengrism is known to have originated in antiquity, with its foundations rooted in myth. At the same time, it occupies a special place in the religious history of the Turkic peoples and is reflected in Turkic written monuments.

The mythological worldview of nomadic peoples included several types of myths: cosmogonic myths concerning the creation and structure of the world; myths of cosmic catastrophe; divine myths concerning the supreme deities Tengri and Umay and their divine powers, the “Sacred Earth-Water,” and Erlik, the god of the underworld; socio-ethnological myths concerning Tengri’s creation of the Turkic state “але” and the heavenly origin of the Turkic kagans; and finally, genealogical myths involving the deification and cult of deceased kagans. The mythological system of the nomads reflects their religious system and has come to be known in modern scholarship as Tengrism. The term Tengrism derives from the word Täŋri, which in the ancient cultures of Central Asia — Sumerian, ancient Chinese, Proto-Altaic, and Proto-Turkic — meant “god.” The German Turkologist Gerhard Doerfer considered the word Tengri in the Turkic and Mongolic languages to be a borrowing. A. V. Dybo, by contrast, argued that it has a genuinely Altaic etymology: Proto-Altaic T’aŋgiri — “oath, deity”; Proto-Mongolic Taŋgarag — “oath”; Proto-Tungusic-Manchu taŋgura — “to pray, to worship.” In Altaic etymology, the word Täŋri is therefore associated, in one way or another, with a religious meaning.

It is also known that the lexeme Täŋri was used in the literal sense of “Sky” or “firmament.” In many translations of runic texts, Täŋri is rendered simply as “Sky.” According to I. L. Kyzlasov, the ancient Turks of southern Siberia and northwestern Mongolia practiced a monotheistic religion during the Early Middle Ages. The Yenisei cave inscriptions associated with monotheism do not identify the deity by name, and this is unlikely to be accidental. In several separate lines, God is referred to as Taңri, recalling the ancient Turkic pagan conception in which the word meant “sky.”

In the sense of “god,” the supreme deity Täŋri can be traced back to the pagan beliefs of nomadic peoples and to the worship of their own Sky as a divine being. The author carried out a semantic analysis of the word Täŋri in order to show how the mythological consciousness of nomads was reflected in the term. According to this interpretation, Täŋri / täŋіri is a compound consisting of two lexemes: täŋ + іŋіr, where täŋ / tŋ means “morning” and іŋіr means “evening.” Through the reduction of disyllabic forms — involving the loss of the sounds i and ŋ — the monosyllabic form Täŋri emerged. Similar phonetic processes in Old Turkic were described by A. N. Kononov, who classified them as syncope: “syncope — the loss of a sound or group of sounds within a word — manifests itself as a tendency for a disyllabic sequence to be reduced to a monosyllabic one, a trisyllabic sequence to a disyllabic one, and a four-syllable sequence to a three-syllable one: jaŋїliq > jaŋliq ‘error’; tarїγlaγ > tarlaγ > tarla ‘harvest’.”

Kazakh mythology contains an ancient legend about two deities — таң, “morning dawn,” and іңір, “evening twilight” — who alternately guard the peace of the inhabitants of the earth throughout the day. The changing of the guard takes place before dusk, and during this interval between light and darkness the people of the earth are expected to remain awake. The names of the two equal deities, таң and іңір, were pronounced together as таң-іңір, eventually merging into a single lexical unit: tәңіr // тәңрі. The lexeme “та” undoubtedly conveys the idea of height or the upper realm, while “ің” (ін) contains the notion of the subterranean world, or the lower realm.

In light of the above, the world as conceived by the ancient Turks did indeed consist of three realms: the upper, middle, and lower worlds. The upper world was regarded as the abode of the supreme deities Tengri (𐰃𐰼𐰭𐱅) and Umay (𐰖𐰢𐰆).

The middle world, referred to in the runic monuments as Jer-Sub — “Earth-Water” (𐰉𐰆𐰽𐰼𐰘) — represented the earth inhabited by all living beings, including humans. The lower world was associated with the subterranean realm or the world of the dead, reflected in the Kül Tegin inscription through expressions such as “below” and “the earth opened up.”

In the runic monuments, Täŋri and other deities directly influence the human world. Tengri, Umay, and Earth-Water are endowed with human qualities and, in the naïve worldview of the Turks, govern earthly affairs and actively participate in the lives and destinies of the ancient Turkic people. The images of the supreme Turkic gods are therefore anthropocentric: they act and create as living human beings do:

Conversely, in the worldview of the ancient Turks, living beings — human beings in particular — could be likened to images of the non-living or divine world. The ancient Turks therefore compared their kagans to the supreme deities Tengri and Umay: On jašda Umaj teg ögüm qatyn quutyŋa inim Kül-tigin er at boldy.

According to the author, the transformation of the non-living into the living, and conversely of the living into the non-living, reveals the naïve ideas of the ancient Turks about the surrounding world and the archaic, or mythological, character of their consciousness, in which the human world and the world of the gods existed within a single spatial and temporal continuum.

The image of Tengri also appears in other monuments of the Early Middle Ages. For example, in the Uyghur work Irig bitig (“Book of Divination”), Tengri is portrayed as a prophetic deity: *Ala atlyγ jol täŋri män. Jarun kiči äšǘr män. — “I am the God of fate, riding a dappled horse. I ride morning and evening.”

The Tibetan work “Catalogue of Principalities,” whose sources date back to the eighth century, likewise mentions the Turkic god Yol-Tengri, meaning the “God of Roads.” Evidently, by that period the word “Tengri” could be used to denote a deity in general, as is also recorded in later Buryat folklore, whose myths speak of 55 “western” and 44 “eastern” tengri. The image of Tengri also appears in historical sources from the Early Middle Ages. Chinese dynastic chronicles report annual sacrificial rituals performed by the ancient Turkic kagans for the Heavenly Deity on the Tamir River. In accounts of the Western Turks, including those within the Khazar Khaganate, Tengri occasionally appears in the form of a celestial giant.

Although Islam reached Central Asia in the tenth century, belief in Tengri among the Turkic peoples persisted through the Karakhanid and Kipchak periods of the later Middle Ages, as reflected in a number of written monuments, including Mahmud al-Kashgari’s Dīwān Lughāt al-Turk and the Codex Cumanicus, as well as Armenian-Kipchak texts of the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries. Thus, the Dīwān Lughāt al-Turk states:

As the text shows, rendering Täŋri as “Allah” was incorrect. An analysis of this version of the dictionary suggests that, unlike in the runic monuments, Täŋri in the Dīwān Lughāt al-Turk is presented solely in a divine capacity — as confirmed by the work’s extensive vocabulary and linguistic style — and is stripped of anthropomorphic features. In the mid-tenth century, the eastern Turkic tribes that laid the foundations of the Karakhanid Empire converted to Islam. Nevertheless, belief in Täŋri continued among the Turkic peoples, as evidenced by Mahmud al-Kashgari’s Dīwān Lughāt al-Turk.

In the religious texts of the Codex Cumanicus, a Kipchak monument of the thirteenth century, the Almighty is referred to as Täŋri. The main body of the monument is religious in nature and includes the Gospels of Luke and Matthew, among other texts, yet God is designated by the word Täŋri. How can the use of the lexeme Täŋri in a Christian text be explained? One possible explanation is that the westward campaigns and migrations of the Cumans and Kipchaks contributed to the spread of Kipchak cultural influence into western regions during the pre-Mongol period, although other explanations are, of course, also possible. The following examples illustrate this usage:

These examples from the monument reveal the religious and ethical principles expected of a believer: love for the Almighty and faith in the omnipotence and power of the Most High.

The image of Täŋri is also preserved in Armenian-Kipchak monuments of the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries. Although Armenians adhered to Armenian Gregorian Christianity, the texts of these monuments use the word Täŋri, along with numerous other Turkic religious expressions, when referring to the Almighty.

Теŋrі (tengri) — Тeŋriniŋ buуruχu (теңрінің буйруху) — “by the will of Tengri”; Теŋrі adam tarbіуatïn еrіklі уaratïptïr da еtіptіr, alе kеräklіdіrlär bіуlärіnä kеndіnіŋ χullar χuluχka, уеr u suv üčün — “Tengri created man free, but for the good of the earth and water it is necessary for him to labor.” The religious vocabulary of the monument is associated not only with the image of Tengri but also reflects the Kipchak lexicon: аlγïš (algysh) — “blessing”; alγïšla (algyshla) — “to bless”; аlγïšlï (algyshly) — alγïšlïbsaγ — “blessed Tengri”; хurban (hurban) — “sacrifice”; тaмuχ (tamukh) — “hell”; tamukhnuh haramkuluha — “the darkness of hell”; еуä (eia) — “creator,” “lord”; хarγïš (hargysh), χarγïšlï (hargyshly) — “curse”; χarγïšlï ornuna tutul — “to be cursed”; šükürlü (shukurlu) — “to be content with little.”

The monuments of the Early and Late Middle Ages contain numerous derivatives of the word Täŋri that are related to it both semantically and formally: täŋri-täg — “originating from Tengri”; täŋri jarätmyš — “created by Tengri”; täŋriči — “servant of God”; täŋrilig — “sanctuary, place of worship of the gods”; täŋriklä — “to worship the gods”; täŋridäm — “divine”; täŋriligdäki — “one who is in the temple,” and many others.

An analysis of the written monuments shows that Tengrism has occupied a distinctive place in the lives of the Turkic peoples and their neighbors and has a long history. Islam has remained the dominant religious system of the Eurasian steppes for more than eleven centuries. Yet even today, within the spiritual consciousness of many Turkic peoples — Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Uyghurs, Bashkirs, Karakalpaks, Uzbeks, and others — Tengrism continues to coexist with Islam and is preserved under its own linguistic forms: in Kazakh — täŋir; in Turkmen — taŋry; in Azerbaijani — tanry; in Turkish — tanry; in Uzbek — taŋri; in Tatar — täŋre; in Bashkir — täŋre; among the Cumans — tengeri; among the Kabardians — tejri; in Karakalpak — täŋir; in Kyrgyz — teŋir; among the Shors — tegri, and others. The religious practices of Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Karakalpaks, Uzbeks, Uyghurs, and other Turkic peoples likewise bear witness to this continuity. These include the veneration of ancestral spirits, commemorative “Ас” rites held on the seventh and fortieth days after death and on the first anniversary, the erection of funerary monuments bearing an image of the deceased, and the baking of memorial flatbreads.