Chigils Erotic

The Chigils were a Turkic tribe first recorded in the 7th century around Lake Issyk-Kul, in the Tian Shan highlands of present-day Kyrgyzstan. By the Mongol era they had merged into the wider Turkic population of the region, and they count among the ancestors of today's Turkic speakers in Kyrgyzstan, southern Kazakhstan and Xinjiang. What held them together as a group was a shared line of descent and a name that kept turning up across five centuries of steppe politics. That line ran back to the Chuyue, a people formed when Western Turkic clans mixed with the Yueban, the last of the northern Xiongnu, who had stayed behind in the western steppe. The Shatuo came from the same Chuyue stock. They moved east and founded short-lived dynasties in northern China. The Chigils stayed west, in the valleys around Issyk-Kul and toward the Talas River. They lived first under the Western Turkic Khaganate and later inside the loose Karluk confederation that took over Semirechye in the 8th century.

Their high point came with the Kara-Khanid Khanate. Together with the Yagma and Tukhsi, the Chigils were among the core tribes behind this dynasty. It adopted Islam in the 10th century, ruled from Kashgar and Balasagun, and took Bukhara from the Samanids in 999. Historians still argue over whether the ruling family itself was Chigil, Yagma or Karluk. Like their neighbors, the Chigils moved from the old steppe worship of Tengri to Sunni Islam when the dynasty converted. In the 1070s the scholar Mahmud al-Kashgari recorded features of Chigil speech in his dictionary of the Turkic dialects and noted that more than one place bore the name. The Qara Khitai conquered the region in the 12th century and the Mongols followed in the 13th, and after that the Chigils disappear from the record as a distinct people. The name outlived them in classical Persian poetry, where Chigil, like Yagma, became a stock term for Turkic good looks. That habit says more about Persian literary taste than about the tribe itself.