the ‘outside’ other 51
respectively) is a special problem with regard to signs and it reveals
the gradual increase of Chinese infl uence in this area. Apart from the
rituals of choosing a ruler, managing the economy, as well as food,
clothing and habits, the Chinese paid the same attention to the Turkic
hair styles as well as to the diff erent way they belted their garments,
which were all elements attributed to a group of people that make it
own or foreign.^131
Th e old Indoiranians-nomads as well as the early Turks belted their
kaft ans from right to left and it was a common habit in the nomadic
world by the fourth-fi ft h century A.D. Th e Tabgach people (Wei
dynasty in China), ex-nomads who conquered the territory of North-
ern China in the fourth century, began to accept the Chinese manner
of belting from left to right. Th is version became popular ca. ninth
century in the steppes to the north and then was expanded by the
Turks both in the Near East and Eastern Europe. Let us point to the
interesting fact that in the earlier period the belting from left to right
marked persons in folklore that belonged to the other world as well as
dead people and some deities,^132 which in these cases was regarded as
a sign of foreignness/otherness.
On the other hand, the imposing of the own and the assimilation of
the foreign, seen through the prism of the costume as a whole, can be
considered one more thing that confi rms the conclusion about the Tur-
kic-Sogdian symbiosis. Th e costume of Sogd as well as the one in Kucha
was turkifi ed aft er the mid-sixth century.^133 In the Turfan oasis (Gao-
chang) the Turks even tried to impose, through administrative chan-
nels, the Turkic costume and habits to the local population in the late
sixth—early seventh century as evidenced in ‘Tang shu’.^134 According
to S. Yatsenko, it was the only place where the Turks had such poli-
tics and exercised pressure upon the local population to replace their
native costume with a Turkic one. So Yatsenko had to look for another
scheme that could explain this exception.^135 In his view, the expla-
nation can be found in one of the Turkic ethnogonic myths stating
that Turfan was the original land of the Turks who left it in the fi ft h
(^131) See the classical description in, Bichurin 1950, 229–231.
(^132) Yatsenko 2000, 89–90.
(^133) Raspopova 1980, 94–97; Vostochnyi Turkestan 2000, 361.
(^134) Chavannes 1903, 102–103.
(^135) Yatsenko 2000b, 363.