Alp Er Tunga

The horses are the first thing the poem notices. The begs have ridden them into the ground, and grief has halted them where they stand. The men around them howl like wolves, tear at their collars and cry out until their eyes are blind with weeping. Somewhere in the middle of the noise a single question keeps coming back: is Alp Er Tunga dead?

That question is the oldest thing left of him. Around 1072 to 1077 the scholar Mahmud al-Kashgari, compiling his great dictionary of the Turkic languages, the *Dīwān Lughāt al-Turk*, needed examples of how words were used, and he reached for verse his people already knew. Scattered through the three volumes, a line here and a stanza there, are eight quatrains of a funeral lament, a *sagu*, for a hero called Alp Er Toŋa. Modern editors have gathered them back into one poem. It opens with its most quoted line: *Alp Er Toŋa öldi mü*, did Alp Er Tunga die? Is the wretched world left behind? Has fate taken its revenge? Now the heart is torn.

The rest of the lament stays close to the grave. Fate watched for its chance, the verses say, and a thief laid out a snare. The lords’ faces turn yellow with grief. The wise are brought low. It is a poem about the people left standing, and it tells almost nothing about how the man they are mourning actually lived.

His name does some of that work. *Alp* is a hero, *er* a man, and Kashgari’s dictionary glosses *toŋa* as a big cat, a tiger or leopard. Put together, the name reads something like “the hero-man who is a tiger.” It is a title as much as a name, and no source gives him another.

The story gets larger the moment it crosses into Iran. Kashgari and his near-contemporary Yusuf Khass Hajib, who finished the long mirror-for-princes poem *Kutadgu Bilig* in 1069, both identify Alp Er Tunga with Afrasiyab, the Turanian king who is the great enemy of Iran in the Persian epic tradition. Yusuf’s lines are frank about the pride behind this. Look closely, he writes, and the Turkish princes are the finest in the world, and among them the one of outstanding fame and glory was Tonga Alp Er, the man the Iranians call Afrasiyab.

That Afrasiyab has a long and dark career. In the Avesta he lurks in Hankana, an underground fortress with iron walls a thousand times the height of a man, forever grasping after the royal glory that slips out of his hands, a figure of drought and ruin. In Ferdowsi’s *Shahnameh* he wages war on Iran across generations and brings about the murder of the gentle prince Siyavash. Siyavash’s son, Kay Khosrow, swears to avenge his father and hunts Afrasiyab to the end. The old king hides in the waters of Lake Chichast, is dragged out, and dies under Kay Khosrow’s sword.

Kashgari gives the same man a gentler, more domestic shape. In his dictionary Afrasiyab is the khaqan, founder of the royal house of khans, tegins and terims. He founded Kashgar, which Kashgari calls Ordu Kand, and he kept his residence at Barchuq. His children Qaz, Barman and Barsghan each founded a city named after themselves, and Kashgari cheerfully traces the Iranian city of Qazvin to *Qaz oyni*, “Qaz’s playground.” It is a picture of a dynasty spreading out across the map, one child and one town at a time, while the Persian poets were busy killing him.

That identification was never idle. The Qarakhanids, the first Muslim Turkic dynasty, founded at Kashgar, were known as the Āl-e Afrāsīāb, the house of Afrasiyab, and the Seljuqs made the same claim. To descend from Iran’s most famous adversary was to claim a place in Iran’s own history, at the head of the other side. Later Turks went further and attributed wise sayings and counsels to Afrasiyab, and a Central Asian Oghuz epic made his son Alp Ariz a giant. Afrasiyab’s Turkish name even surfaces, garbled, in Persian prose: copies of the *Naṣīḥat al-Mulūk* attributed to al-Ghazali spell it in forms that modern scholars read back to Tunga Alp Er.

Whether a real man stands behind the lament is an open question. The Turkologist Talat Tekin proposed Tonga Tegin, a son of the Second Turkic Khaganate’s ruler Qapaghan Khagan, who was ambushed and killed by Chinese forces near Beshbalik in 714, which would fit the snare the elegy mentions. Fuad Köprülü preferred an earlier hero, perhaps of the fifth century, or another Tonga Tegin whom history never recorded. Neither case can be proved. The Iranian Afrasiyab, meanwhile, is far older than any Turk the Iranians met, and Ehsan Yarshater argued that the Turanians were probably only identified with the Turks around the early seventh century, after the two peoples first came into contact.

So the record is uneven, and it is worth being plain about the joins. No full Turkic epic of Alp Er Tunga survives. What modern Turkish textbooks present as the *Alp Er Tunga Destanı* is the eight-stanza lament from Kashgari, set beside the Iranian story of Afrasiyab, with the second supplying the plot the first never had. Popular Turkish retellings say he was lured to his death by treachery at Kay Khosrow’s invitation. The dictionary itself only says that a snare was laid.

What he could do comes through the grief rather than any feat. He held the Turkish princes together, and when he was gone the lament says the world itself seemed broken, the times gone bad, and virtue scattered. His power was the power of a khaqan: to found cities, to father dynasties, and to be claimed as an ancestor centuries after his death by rulers who needed him.

His weakness is the one every sagu is built around. Fate watched him, waited, and found its moment. Whether the snare was Chinese, Iranian or simply time itself, the tiger-hero did not see it coming, and the men who loved him were left tearing their collars on the steppe.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Alp Er Tunga?

Alp Er Tunga is a legendary Turkic hero and khaqan whose death is mourned in the oldest surviving Turkic lament, preserved in Mahmud al-Kashgari’s eleventh-century dictionary, the *Dīwān Lughāt al-Turk*. Kashgari and the poet Yusuf Khass Hajib both identified him with Afrasiyab, the Turanian king of Iranian epic.

Is Alp Er Tunga the same as Afrasiyab?

Eleventh-century Turkic writers treated them as one man. Yusuf Khass Hajib’s *Kutadgu Bilig* (1069) calls Tonga Alp Er the most famous of the Turkish princes and says the Iranians call him Afrasiyab. The Iranian Afrasiyab is much older, appearing in the Avesta and later in Ferdowsi’s *Shahnameh*.

How did Alp Er Tunga die?

The Turkic lament for Alp Er Tunga says only that fate watched for its chance and a snare was laid for him. In the Iranian tradition, Afrasiyab is hunted down by Kay Khosrow, pulled from his hiding place in Lake Chichast and killed. Popular Turkish retellings combine the two into a story of treachery.

What does the name Alp Er Tunga mean?

The name joins three Turkic words: alp, meaning hero, er, meaning man, and tunga (toŋa), which Kashgari’s dictionary explains as a tiger or leopard. Taken together, Alp Er Tunga means roughly “the hero-man who is a tiger.”

Was Alp Er Tunga a real person?

Nobody knows. The Turkologist Talat Tekin linked him to Tonga Tegin, a Turkic prince ambushed and killed by Chinese forces near Beshbalik in 714, while Fuad Köprülü suggested an earlier, unrecorded hero, and neither identification can be proved.

Related Entries

Dede Korkut, Koroglu, Tengri, Umay, Asena, Tepegoz, Rostam, Zal, Sohrab, Fereydun, Zahhak, Kaveh the Blacksmith, Simurgh