The Many Ways of Being Human

3.3

The Turkic Peoples

A stone slab on a carved turtle stands in the Orkhon valley, raised in the 730s for a prince named Kul Tigin, and it warns its own people that Chinese words are sweet and Chinese silk is soft. From this oldest Turkic text the chapter follows a language family of roughly two hundred million people, spread from the Lena river to Istanbul.