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The wolf may be reviled in European and Euro-centric cultures. In India too, the animal does not necessarily have a benign image, as is apparent from the recent hysteria regarding the attacks in Uttar Pradesh’s Bahraich district.
But humanity’s encounter with Canis lupus does not necessarily have to be antagonistic. Indeed, there are examples within Asia itself of how humans have not only revered wolves but sometimes also treated them as totemic animals, from which their own clans derive descent.
The best example of this is found in the Turkic peoples, who inhabit a vast stretch of Eurasia — from the Turks of Turkiye to the Yakuts of Siberia. Others include the Kyrgyz, Kazakh, Turkmen, Uzbek, Uyghur and Azeri, just to name a few.
The Turkic peoples are thought to have originated somewhere on the borders of China and first appear in Chinese history in the 540s CE. In just a few years, they had already established their first state — The Turkic Khaganate.
From then on, the Turkic peoples would appear all over Eurasia. Contacts between them and the early Arab caliphates would result in the Turks adopting Islam and becoming foremost warriors of the faith. The Muslim Turkic peoples established states such as the Seljuq Empire and the Ottoman Empire. In the subcontinent, at least three and possibly four of the Delhi Sultanate’s dynasties were of Turkic origin.
The Mughal Empire, which succeeded the Delhi Sultanate, was Turko-Mongolic ethnically.
But how does the wolf feature in all this, one might ask?
The Turkic Khaganate was founded by the Gokturks, a Turkic people from the heart of Asia.
“The Ashina, the ruling clan of the Türks, forged a core union of 30 tribes, the Türk boδun (‘Türk People’) noted in the Türk and Uyğur inscriptions. They founded a Qağanate (empire) in Mongolia in 552, having successfully overthrown their Rouran/Avar overlords and rapidly expanded across Eurasia, conquering lands from the borders of Manchuria to the Pontic steppes and Crimea,” journalist, historian, and novelist Peter Golden notes in his 2018 paper The Ethnogonic Tales of the Turks.
It is the Ashina clan that connects the Turkic peoples to the wolf.
“The origin tales of the Türks, which may be divided into ‘Wolf Tale I’, ‘Wolf Tale II’, ‘the Shemo/Žama Tale’ and a ‘Historical Account’, were recorded in Chinese dynastic histories and historical compilations based on or copied from the same source(s) and repeated in later collections of historical tales,” notes Golden.
The Wolf Tale I is recorded in detail by the Zhoushou, the official dynastic history of the Northern Zhou dynasty of Ancient China that lasted from 557-581 CE.
The story goes that the ancestors of the Gokturks lived on the right bank of the ‘Western Sea’. One day, they were attacked by a neighbouring state which massacred everyone except a 10-year-old boy, who was spared because the enemy soldiers did not have the heart to kill him.
So, they cut off his feet and threw him into a grass-covered swamp. “Here, there was a she-wolf who fed the young boy meat. He grew up and had relations with the she-wolf, who became pregnant. When the king of the neighbouring state learned that the youth was still alive, he again sent men to kill him. When they saw a she-wolf beside the young man, they wanted to kill her too. The she-wolf fled to a mountain in the north in the state of Gaochang (Turfan),” Golden translates the story.
His paper continues: “There was a cave in this mountain in which there was a broad plain with abundant grass. This plain, which stretched out for hundreds of li and was surrounded on all sides by mountains. The she-wolf hid in the mountains. Here, she gave birth to ten sons. When they grew up, they went out of the cave and married women from the outside. They brought many children into the world. Each of these descendants took a family name and one of them took the name Ashina.”
These 10 clans formed the core of the 30 tribes of the Gokturks. Thus, the Gokturks, who formed the first important Turkic polity, traced their descent to a she-wolf.
But it is not just the Turkic peoples. An even more powerful personality, one that is today famous and infamous in equal measure globally, also traced his origin to a wolf.
“At the beginning there was a blue-grey wolf, born with his destiny ordained by Heaven Above. His wife was a fallow doe. They came crossing the Tenggis. After they had settled at the source of the Onan River on Mount Burqan Qaldun, Batačiqan was born to them,” begins The Secret History of the Mongols, written sometime after the death of Genghis Khan. Written after 1227 CE, when Khan died, it traced the genealogy of the world conqueror and the lives of his ancestors.
The blue-grey wolf mentioned at the beginning of the work is the totemic ancestor of Genghis.
“The wolf theme is ancient and widespread across Eurasia, from Rome to Inner Asia. Whether it came to the Ashina from neighbouring ‘Scythian’ peoples or was part of a possible ancient Iranian patrimony remains an open question…Among the Türks (and later the Činggisid Mongols) the wolf was worshipped as an ancestor, whereas in other wolf tales (e.g., Roman, Sāsānid), it is a ‘divinely guided nurse’,” writes Golden.
He adds that the wolf and cavern motifs, whatever their origins, played an important role in the symbolic life of the Türks. These were well-known in Siberian shamanism, which still exists today among the indigenous peoples of the Asiatic part of the Russian Federation.
Since Babur, the founder of the Mughal Empire in South Asia, claimed descent from both Genghis (through his mother) and Timur (through his father), maybe South Asia should also consider the wolf its very own totem!