Tängri

Tängri is the god of the eternal blue heaven, the highest power of the pre-Islamic Turkic and Uyghur world. The word names at once the visible firmament and the deity who dwells in and rules it. In the Orkhon and Tonyukuk inscriptions Tängri creates the khagan, grants the heaven-sent fortune (qut) by which rulers govern, and, invoked beside Umay and the sacred Earth-Water, delivers victory to the Turks. Kāshgarī records that the unbelieving Turks called the sky teŋri and applied the same word to anything they held great or exalted. Though the Uyghur court adopted Manichaeism in the 760s and later Islam, the heaven-cult persisted as a substratum in oath, blessing and folk belief.

Domains

• sky heaven
• royal fortune

Powers

• governs the eternal sky
• bestows sovereign fortune on the khagan

Epithets

• Kök Tängri — Blue (Eternal) HeavenRoux, La religion des Turcs et des Mongols (1984), 122-125 (secondary)

Relations

• companion: UmayInvoked together with Umay and the sacred Earth-Water as the tutelary powers who grant victory.Tonyukuk inscription, line invoking 'Täŋri, Umay, ïduq Yer-Sub', ed. Tekin 1968 (primary)

Sources

• Tängri is the supreme heaven-deity of the Old Turkic and Uyghur peoples, attested by name in the 8th-century runic inscriptions and in Kāshgarī.: Orkhon and Tonyukuk inscriptions, 8th c. CE, ed. Tekin 1968 (primary); Maḥmūd al-Kāshgarī, Dīwān Lughāt al-Turk (1072-74), trans. Robert Dankoff & James Kelly, Compendium of the Turkic Dialects (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1982-85), s.v. teŋri (primary)
• Uyghur retention of the sky-cult beneath later Manichaean and Islamic layers is documented ethnographically and historically.: Erkoç, 'Pre-Manichaean Beliefs of the Uyghurs I', Harvard Theological Review 116, no. 1 (2023) (secondary)