The Origins & Background of the Theory of

Turkish as the Original ('Sacred') Language of Mankind

© 2003 – R. Charles Weller

All rights reserved.

On the Parthia-L@yahoogroups.com list, Nader Rasteger noted the following (11 JAN 2003):  "There is a 'Site' created and maintained as:  http://www.lostlanguages.com/  by a Selahi Diker, Ph.D., a Turkish born American.  It is titled: AND THE WHOLE EARTH WAS OF ONE LANGUAGE.  Dr. Diker has published two books:  AND THE  WHOLE  EARTH WAS OF ONE LANGUAGE and TEN THOUSAND YEARS OF THE TURKS.  The Turkish version is:  'TÜRK Dili'nin Bes Bin Yili' - 'Five Thousand Years of the Turkish Language'.  Very succinctly put, the aim is to show that Turkish is the Mother of All Civilizations and of All Languages."

Without personally embracing his entire paradigm, a good resource on the general issue of 'original and/or sacred language theories' is Maurice Olender, 1989, Les langues du paradis: Aryens et Semites, un couple providentiel, Editions du Seuil (transl. by Arthur Goldhammer, 1992, The Languages of Paradise: Race, Religion, and Philology in the Nineteenth Century, Harvard).  This book does not treat the Turkish argument specifically, but deals with the same basic catagory of problem which is involved, namely how many European nations in the post-Reformation era made claim of their own mother tongue / national language as that which was spoken by Adam and Eve as well as God in the Garden of Eden, making them the original and root language of all humankind.  The Turks, like a good number of 'Christian peoples-nations' (cf. 'Christian civilizations'), have claimed (at least indirectly) that they are the heirs of Israel's elect national status, applying general Christian and Muslim theologies to their own particular peoples / nations (cf. e.g. Matt. 21:43; 1Pet. 2:9-10; cf. Anthony D. Smith, "Chosen Peoples," in J. Hutchinson, A.D. Smith, eds., 1994, Ethnicity, Oxford Reader, pp 189ff).

In this vein, the earliest Muslim source which links the Turks to Noah (and his son Japheth) is found in a publication of the year 1076 by the Turkish Muslim writer of the Qharakhanid Dynasty, Mahmud ibn al-Husayn ibn Muhammed. His more common name is Mahmud Kashgari. In his well-known work, the Diwan lughat al-Turk (or Dictionary of Turkic Languages), he links Turk to Japheth and Noah. Relatedly, Svet Soucek (2000, A History of Inner Asia, Cambridge, pp 87-91) records Kashgari as saying: "the Lord Himself bestowed the name Turk, for [it is] a statement traced back to the Noble Prophet [Muhammed]…, who said: "The Lord says: I have a host whom I have called Turks and whom I have set in the East…"" (citing Dankoff and Kelly, Compendium, vol. I, p. 274; cf. S. Bastug, "Tribe, Confederation and StateAmong Altaic Nomads of the Asian Steppes," in Korkut A. Erturk, 1999, Re-thinking Central Asia, pp 83-4).

Soucek goes on in the footnote (7) to say: "The Arabic version of this remarkable hadith is as follows: "Yaqulu Allah jalla wa-azza: Inna li jundan sammaytuhum al-Turk, wa-askantuhum al-mashriqa; fa-idha ghadibtu ala qawmin sallattuhum alayhim."  The hadith, then, substantiates the 'divine election' and 'manifest destiny' of the Turks as a great nation in God's plan in human history and justifies tracing out its sacred and ancient origins, i.e. its link with Noah and his three sons.  While one may have existed, there is no record of such a view in Turkic tradition prior to Kashgari, who of course wrote in 1076, after-the-fact of the Turkish rise to power across Central Asia and the Middle East.  I am uncertain as to the origins and weight of authority afforded this hadith in broader Islamic tradition, but for those who accept it, it would by itself make the entire theory quite difficult to question in dialogue with a Muslim scholar, since the hadith are taken (nearly) on par with the Qur'an as authoritative in Islamic tradition.

Regardless, once one takes the Turks all the way back to the time of Noah, they place themselves within the era of human history, from the perspective of the Taurat (i.e. Torah), when "the whole earth was of one language."  This of course is precisely the title of one of the professor's books, a quote taken directly from Genesis 11:1, the narrative section of the genealogy of Noah's three sons.  Our professor has, to repeat, simply done what a host of other particularly later Christian peoples-nations have done by attempting to trace themselves and their 'national language' back to this era and link it with the original language of all humankind (cf. 'sacred languages').

The interesting thing about this from a Turkish Muslim point of view is that the Arabs do much the same for Arabic via Father Abraham (as do the Jews and many Christians for Hebrew or 'proto-Hebrew').  Indeed, Islamic theology typically goes beyond holding Arabic as simply the original language of humankind; they claim that Qur'anic Arabic was written on 'eternal' tablets contained in heaven before the creation of the world, from which God "sent down" (Arb. 'nazzala') the Qur'an to Muhammed (cf. Plato's world of 'forms'; cf. also the alleged 'golden tablets' of the Book of Mormon).  Of course, if the Arabic of the Qur'an is just a derivitive of (proto-)Turkish, as the professor's theory would seem to suggest, then I suppose this would not be a problem within his framework of understanding.  I would still be interested to hear his, as well as some Arab Muslim scholars', response to this apparent 'tension' of claims between Arabic and Turkish, however.

(By the way, notwithstanding the need for basic textual and historical criticism, I myself esteem the Taurat-Inzhil literature, including its basic record of Naoh and his sons, and intend no slighting of anyone's religious or ethnic traditions, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Turkic / -ish, Arab, Hebrew, European or otherwise.  I respect my neighbors and their respective faiths in the world community.  I am simply attempting in this brief essay to set forth the history and theology behind these issues as impartially as humanly possible in the hope of mutual faithfulness and integrity in the task of interpreting history.  I request pardon in advance for any failures to achieve that goal and welcome any responses; thank you.)