Karluks Erotic

The Karluks were a Turkic tribal confederacy of the early medieval steppe, recorded between the fifth and eighth centuries in the country along the Black Irtysh and the Tarbagatai range west of the Altai, and they did not so much disappear as dissolve into the Karakhanid state and, through it, into the ancestry of today's Uzbeks and Uyghurs. Chinese annalists wrote them down as Geluolu. The Orkhon inscriptions call them the Üch Qarluq, the Three Karluks, which tells you the confederacy was three tribes under one leadership rather than a single people with a single origin. For most of their early history they answered to the Türk khagans, until they joined the Uyghurs and Basmyl in the revolt of 742 that finished off the Second Turkic Khaganate. The alliance did not hold. Pushed out of the Mongolian steppe by their former Uyghur partners, the Karluks moved southwest into Zhetysu, the Seven Rivers country of what is now southeastern Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, and in 766 took Suyab, the old Türgesh capital in the Chu valley.

Their one moment in world history that most readers have met is the battle of Talas in 751, where a Karluk contingent attached to the Tang army is reported to have turned on it mid-battle and handed the field to the Abbasids. Treachery or realignment, the result helped settle that Transoxiana would face west toward Islam rather than east toward China, and the Karluks put themselves in position to benefit. Their ruler carried the title yabghu, a rank deliberately below khagan, and only after the Uyghur collapse of 840, in the usual reconstruction, did a Karluk leadership claim the higher title. Out of that claim came the Karakhanids, in which Karluk, Chigil, and Yaghma tribes were welded into a state whose khan, Satuq Bughra, accepted Islam in the mid-tenth century. Arabic chroniclers record two hundred thousand tents of Turks converting in 960, and by 999 this first Muslim Turkic dynasty of Central Asia had taken Bukhara from the Samanids. Before Islam the Karluks kept the sky-god religion of the steppe. After it, their language became a literary one. The Kutadgu Bilig and the great Turkic dictionary of Mahmud al-Kashgari, who counted the Karluks among the nomadic Turkmen and set them apart from the Oghuz, were written in Karakhanid Turkic, and the branch of the family that includes Uzbek and Uyghur still bears the Karluk name. The tribal name outlived the state too. Karluks fought beside the Kara Khitai at Qatwan in 1141, submitted to Genghis Khan in 1211, and small groups calling themselves Qarluq persist in Uzbek clan lists and in the valleys of northern Afghanistan.