The Western Uyghur Kingdom and Relations with Eastern and Northern Neighbours
(64th Meeting Budapest, 2022)
Inner-Asian languages and cultures were in close exchange and contact. And influences from non-Altaic areas of the West, South and East came into play during the latter half of the first millennium CE. Recent research, also within the framework of PIAC, has shown that the period once called “pre-Turkic” by Willy Bang can now also be documented with linguistic evidence which can be seen as a kind of coexistence of Turkic and Mongolian languages. For the following periods of the steppe realms and the Uighur kingdoms, the feudal relationships come into consideration, which generally document the direction from Turkic to Mongolian. But the opposite direction is also documented.
While so far little evidence of borrowings and/or contacts with the other non-Chinese peoples of the North and East, the Tanguts, the Khitan (Liao) or the Jin is known, points of contact can be assumed, especially between Tangut and Uighur Buddhists, as Kōichi Kitsudō’s research has shown. The relations between Uighur and Mongolian Buddhists were particularly close.