Turkic migration west, and the Iranic peoples

[mirzaagysh]

Often enough when I am reading books and information on the Internet related to the history of Central Asia and how its ethnic and cultural dynamics have worked and changed over the course of history, I find that the supposed clash between the Turkic tribal confederations that were migrating towards the west from what is today Mongolia, and the Iranic nomads and ethnic groups that had lived in the same said area before is often an overlooked subject, and is rarely if ever explored even though in my opinion it's one of the key elements that helped shape the identity of the ethnolinguistic group we today know as the Turkic peoples. We know there was a period of assimilation and perhaps some lesser degree of conflict, but I'd be delighted to hear some more thorough facts related to this process from folks who are more knowledgeable on it than I am. It seems a little bit unreasonable that as soon as the Turkic tribes arrived in the Central Asian region, the Iranic peoples immediately began following the customs of the newcomers, and adopted their language, cultural traits and perhaps appearance.

[H. İhsan Erkoç]

The mixture between Turkic and Iranic nomads was already happening in the earlier Iron Age cultures in southern Siberia as well as on the Kazakh and Pontic-Caspian Steppes. Various tombs from southern Siberian Turkic cultures such as Tagar have been discovered as containing multi-racial skeletons (for example, a Caucasoid male and a Mongoloid female buried together, most probably husband and wife). DNA examination of numerous Scythian skeletons found in tombs from Ukraine and southern Russia has revealed that up to 30% of those Scythians had DNA structures found common in eastern Asians. The Chinese recorded in Suishu that the ancestors of the Gokturks were living in Gansu "mixed with Hu (Iranic, mostly Soghdian, settlers)". And Mahmud of Kashghar tells us in the 11th century that the Soghdians living in the towns located in the Jaxartes Valley were living mixed with the Oghuz Turks and those Soghdians were on the way of Turkification as "they have adopted the clothes, manners and language of the Oghuz".

Here are a few examples I know of the mixture of Turkic and Iranic nomads as well as the Turkification of Iranic peoples.

[mustafaaka]

Thanks for your shared.

[H. İhsan Erkoç]

You are welcome, and welcome aboard.

[Temüjin]

in fact due to the scarce sources, we cannot even know for sure that turkic language replaced the iranian, other than the soghdians, we don't have enough examples of f. ex. scythians actually speakign iranian at all, it's just and 'eductated guess' by academics that has been widely accepted among many western scholars, because it would also support the equally flawed theory about the proto-indo-european language....

[H. İhsan Erkoç]

That is right. We tend to think of these early Steppe tribes as homogeneous and monolinguistic groups, but it is quite possible that they were multilinguistic people.