Turks: a Journey of a Thousand Years, 600-1600

'Turks' (Royal Academy, 2005) is presumably based on the same principle as the Royal Academy's spectacular exhibition, 'Aztecs' (2002–3), which introduced an entire civilization through its sculptures of gods and instruments of ritual practices. But it cannot achieve the same powerful impression because there are too many disparate objects identified as Turkic. Taking 600 AD as its starting point means that the Far Eastern features of things Turkic are very prominent, including much art regularly classed as 'Chinese'. Ending at 1600 AD permits the exhibition to conclude with Süleyman the Magnificent, as if everything had been working up towards this highpoint. But it is almost impossible to sustain a direct link between the Asian Turkic groups and the Ottomans. Indeed, the historical chronology promised on page 38 of the lavishly-illustrated catalogue turns out to be blank – there is no attempt to create a time-line connecting the earliest with the latest so-called Turks.

There is something deeply unsatisfactory about this approach. Yet the fact that a Muslim minority, which speaks Turkish and identifies itself as Uighur, still exists in Northern China today confirms a significant link between the Asiatic and Western Turks. In centuries past, as now, one could travel eastwards from the Mediterranean to the Pacific speaking Uighur Turkish. A deep linguistic current has survived all the upheavals and revolutions of one and a half millennia. Why doesn't the exhibition explain this?

In November 1922, when Mustafa Kemal announced the abolition of the Ottoman Empire, he commissioned school textbooks for the new secular state of Turkey with the instruction that they should demonstrate that the Turks were at the base of all civilizations. He proceeded to Turkify everything about the Ottoman world: its script was latinized, its language purged of Persian, Arabic and non-Turkish words, its religion set aside in a distinct corner, its court westernized. For this great campaign of modernization he was offered the name 'Atatürk', father of the Turks. It nonetheless rested on an assumption that Turkish origins could be identified with the cradle of world civilization.

The origins of the Turks are indeed obscure but they are related to developments in the Far East among Asian steppe tribes, whose nomadic way of life made them self-sufficient and developed their famous skills as horsemen and archers. They shared many of these characteristics with other tribes such as the Mongols. Turkic languages belong to the Altaic family which includes Uzbek, Khazakh and Mongolic and is more distantly related to Korean and Japanese. But the scripts in which they were written, the religious beliefs they record, and Turkic relations with other medieval tribes like the Oghurs, Avars, Khazars, Sogdians and Mongols all remain problematic. The catalogue tries to address some of these issues. Peter Golden shows how Uighur Turks became dominant in central Asia in the eighth century, abandoned Manichaeanism for Buddhism and translated all the Buddhist writings into Turkic, using Uighur and Manichaean scripts. Uighur script was also used for Nestorian Christian texts. During the Mongol period Uighur administrators served in the empire of Genghis Khan. Islam had reached central Asia by the eighth century but was not adopted until the thirteenth, when the Seljuks in Transcaucasia and the Qarakhanids of Transoxiana converted.

The linguistic variety of Turks before their conversion to Islam is brilliantly illustrated in the writing used on eleventh to thirteenth-century objects. Uighur script dominates the Buddhist stakes, a banner and a copy of the Book of the Dead. Runic and Syriac (Christian) inscriptions are found on gravestones, and a tenth-century Runic translation of the Book of Omens is written with black ink on paper in the Chinese style. On a large basalt rock from Kazakhstan (no. 147), honours given to Timur (Tamerlane) in 1391 are recorded in both Uighur and Arabic, which hints at a polyglot culture even after the conversion to Islam.

The exhibition opens with material from Xinjiang, in Chinese Central Asia, brought back by German expeditions of 1902–14. This emphasis accounts for the visual impact of Asia on many of the later exhibits. In...