32 chapter one
in Eastern Turkistan (in Kocho and Turfan, in particular) and their
fi nal sedentarization.^63
China, being a border culture, played a certain role in the develop-
ment of the Turkic identity, although it was not a direct role since the
opposition ‘we, the nomads’—‘they, the sedentarists’ was embedded in
its foundations. Following the same model, as a mirror refl ection of
the Byzantine otherness, although not focusing on the nomads–seden-
tarists opposition, the Bulgars also created and developed their iden-
tity until the beginning of the ninth century. Aft er their successful
military campaigns in the south and the conquest of the greater part
of the Byzantine West, the Haemus Mountain was no longer a border
between the Bulgars and the Byzantines. A considerable number of
Greek-speaking people—former subjects of the Byzantine Empire—
remained in the newly acquired Bulgarian territories and this required
a soft ening of the notion that ‘the Byzantine is not ours but foreign’.
Th is was the moment when the confessional diff erence came to the
fore (‘the Byzantines are others, because they are Christians’).^64
Th e existence of real borders such as the Caucasus Mountains and
the steppe to the north of China put obstacles in front of the real and
permanent conquest of the Turkic territories by China and the Kha-
zar territories by the Arabs, respectively. Th e same conclusion is also
valid for the other side of this relation as the Turks and the Uighurs
did not aim at permanent domination over the sedentary Chinese.^65
Th e foreignness of the “Northern barbarians” and the Chinese hostility
towards them also provides circumstantial evidence of the great diff er-
ence that existed on both sides of the Great Wall of China. Th e Chi-
nese historian Ban Gou (d. 92 A.D.) explicitly designates its parameters
and names in his “History of the Former Han dynasty”: he writes that
compared to the Middle Kingdom, the nomads wear diff erent clothes,
have diff erent habits, eat and drink diff erent things, speak incompre-
hensible languages, live isolated in the steppe, migrate from place to
place in search for new pastures for their herds and are hunters. In
his view, they are, too, cut off from the Chinese by the mountainous
(^63) von Gabain 1961; von Gabain 1973. Also see, Stepanov 2004, 288–305. Th e pro-
verb narrated by Mahmud al-Kashgari (the eleventh century) represents quite well
that Turkic-Sogdian symbiosis: “As the head can’t be without a hat, so the Turk can’t
be without a Tat”, where ‘Tat’ means people who speak Eastern Iranian dialects and
live in the region of the Central Asian towns. 64
See Beshevleiv 1992, N 14.
(^65) Pritsak 1981b, 19; Jagchid 1991, 69, 75, 77–78.