The Turkic Migration

Map from Mahmud al-Kashgari's Diwanu Lughat at-Turk, showing the 11th century distribution of Turkic tribes. 
Mavi Boncuk | 


The Turkic migration as defined in this article was the expansion of the Turkic peoples across most of Central Asia into Europe and the Middle East between the 6th and 11th centuries AD (theEarly Middle Ages). Tribes less certainly identified as Turkic began their expansion centuries earlier as the predominant element of the Huns. Their prehistoric point of origin was the hypothetical Proto-Turkic region of the Far East including North China and Inner Mongolia. They may have been among the peoples of the multi-ethnic historical Saka known as early as the Greek writer Herodotus. 


They moved on the Pontic-Caspian steppe, the vast steppeland stretching from the north of the Black Sea (Graeco-Roman tradition refers to it as the 'Hospitable sea', Euxeinos Pontos (Εὔξεινος Πόντος) - thus a euphemism - in antiquity) as far as the east of the Caspian Sea, from western Ukraine across the Southern Federal District and the Volga Federal District of Russia to western Kazakhstan, forming part of the larger Eurasian steppe, adjacent to the Kazakh steppe to the east. It is of the paleartic temperate grasslands, savannas, and shrublands ecoregion of the temperate grasslands, savannas, and shrublands biome. The area corresponds to Scythia and Sarmatia of Classical antiquity. Across several millennia the steppe was used by numerous tribes of nomadic horsemen, many of which went on to conquer lands in the settled regions of Europe and in western and southern Asia. It was finally brought under the control of a sedentary people by the Russian Empire in the 16th to 18th centuries. Genetic research has identified this region as the most probable place where horses were first domesticated.