Yıva Erotic

The Yıva were one of the twenty-four tribes of the medieval Oghuz Turks. They were a herding clan on the steppe along the lower Syr Darya and the Aral Sea in the ninth and tenth centuries. Later they moved west with the Seljuk conquests into Iran, Iraq, Azerbaijan and Anatolia, and their descendants blended into the Turkmen, Azerbaijani and Turkish peoples. What made them a group was family descent more than territory. Oghuz tradition treated all its tribes as one family: the grandsons of the legendary ruler Oghuz Khagan, sorted under his six sons. The Yıva traced their line to Deniz Khan, the Sea Khan and youngest son, along with the İğdir, Büğdüz and Kınık tribes. That put them in the Üçok, the Three Arrows, the junior half of the Oghuz alliance, as opposed to the senior Bozok. In the story, the elder brothers found a golden bow and broke it into shares, while the younger ones found three silver arrows. The image became shorthand for rank, precedence and who sat where when the Oghuz gathered.

Almost everything known about the Yıva comes from the people who wrote the Oghuz down. Mahmud al-Kashgari, compiling his Turkic dictionary in the 1070s, listed the Yıva and drew their tamga, the mark each tribe put on its horses and herds. More than two centuries later the Persian historian Rashid al-Din gave every tribe a meaning, a totem bird and a set cut of meat at feasts. He said the name Yıva meant roughly of high rank. They spoke Oghuz Turkic, the branch that later produced Turkmen, Azerbaijani and Turkish. Like the Oghuz in general, they moved from worship of the sky god Tengri to Sunni Islam during the tenth and eleventh centuries, without dropping older steppe custom. After the Seljuk victory at Dandanaqan in 1040, Yıva bands spread across the new Turkic lands to the west. The Turkish historian Faruk Sümer argued that the Qara Qoyunlu, the Turkmen dynasty that ruled Azerbaijan, Iraq and western Iran for much of the fifteenth century, were of Yıva descent.

No living community goes by the name today. The Yıva survive as a line in the origin story that Turkmen, Azerbaijanis and Turks still tell about themselves, and as one of the twenty-four tamgas reproduced wherever that story is retold.