Written by Ami John
In 1923 with the foundation of Türkiye as a republic and Ataturk as its first president, a new history was in the process of creation.
The new history and revised language were created with several interconnected objectives, such as: to resist the recent European imperialist interests in Turkish territories as defined by the 1920 Treaty of Sevres (a treaty which abolished Ottoman rule and obliged Türkiye to renounce its control of Arab Asia and North Africa), to present the country’s history as one of the Turkish people and to counter the claims of indigenous rights from groups like the Armenians and Greeks.
Thus, the whole idea was to rewrite a history in order to forge a unified past of the diverse people that formed this new nation with a language stripped of foreign influence, especially trying to break from Arab and Persian influence. As such following this model, the Turkish Historical Thesis, introduced in 1930 An Outline of Turkish History and explained the first three congresses of both the historical and linguistic societies which aimed to replace both Ottoman and Eurocentric world histories, that had viewed progress as a series of migrations (Indo-Europeans, Biblical and the pinnacle of civilisation being European and American). In order to move away from this, the thesis brought into play an idea of the migration of Turkomans from Central Asia as part of an ongoing chain of migrations stretching back to prehistoric times.
According to the Turkish Historical Thesis, the original Turks of Central Asia first migrated to China and then to India, where they established the civilizations of Mohenjo Darro and Harappa. After this, the Turkish migrations moved westward along two main routes: a northern route from the Ural Mountains and Caspian Sea to the Black Sea coast, Danube River, and Thrace, and a southern route, accessible after the glaciers retreated. The southern route took Turkish tribes to Mesopotamia, Anatolia, the Italian Peninsula (as the Etruscans), the Aegean islands (especially Crete), Greece, and through Syria, Palestine, and Mesopotamia (as the Sumerians and Elamites) to Egypt. The Turkish Historical Thesis notably claimed civilisations with unclassified languages, like Sumerian, Etruscan, and Hittite, which was being studied as a potential proto-Indo-European language.
Linguistic congresses in 1932 and 1934 presented a variety of articles with a dual aim with the focus of many papers being to use language to bring about racial unity between the Turks, Sumerians and Aryans. They sought to not only link Turkish with ancient languages, such as Sumerian, Hittite, and Etruscan, which had not been classified within any modern language families, but also with Indo-European and Semitic languages. Underlying much of this linguistic framework was the goal of simplifying the process of nationalising language, which was a core objective of Ataturk’s “Pure Turkish” movement. Artin Cebeli a teacher in a school in Istanbul emphasised on the expelling of foreign words from the Turkish tongue parallelling the expulsion of invaders from Türkiye during the War of Independence, just a decade earlier.
So, what was the Sun Language Theory?
The theory was first introduced in November 1935 in the Ankara daily Ulus. Its full expression came at the Third Linguistic Congress in 1936, where Ibrahim Necmi Dilmen, General Secretary of the Turkish Language Association, introduced the Sun-Language Theory. He presented it as the solution to the Pure Turkish dilemma that had intrigued linguists since the field’s inception: the discovery of the mother tongue by primitive humans as they transitioned from their animal instincts to a higher consciousness. According to Dilmen, early humans, focusing on the sun as a powerful emblem or divine power would have first uttered “a,” the simplest phoneme of the human vocal system, which requires no lip movement. An elongated version of this sound would result in “ag,” where the “g” in Turkish signifies the elongation of the vowel. What Dilmen did not address was that “ag” in modern Turkish means “net,” not “sun.” The implication, however, was that it wasn’t modern Turkish that was the original language, but rather the primeval tongue of the Turks. This was supported by the supposed racial superiority of the Central Asian Turks, who had spread language and culture (this claim evidenced by historical and linguistic evidence through the preservation of root words in Turkic dialects). Dilmen then outlined that in the Sun Language Theory, the sounds were classified by their ease of pronunciation and could be modified by adding ag-like phonemes in an agglutinative process, similar to modern Turkish. This was as such an openly anti-imperialist take.
However, never in our history has there been an attempt to create a new language.
This connection between the sun and language in Türkiye wasn’t just based on ancient myths but was rooted in the country’s modern history. In 1935, Remzi Oguz Arik led the excavation of Alacahoyiik, a Hittite site between Corum and Ankara. The discoveries were nothing major and mostly abstract objects, but Arik noted that when they reached a depth of about 6 meters, they discovered bronze, iron, and even silver objects, which they called “solar disks.
This idea fell in line with the first Turkish Historical Thesis which linked the Sumerians to Anatolia. Archaeological finds in Türkiye, including symbols like the swastika, added to this. A 1935 Cumhuriyet article reported that Turkish reporters saw a Uygur mosaic with a swastika in Berlin, linking it to Central Asia and suggesting its later adoption by Buddhism. Alongside this, two discs found at the site were interpreted as solar symbols. These discoveries, while tied to Aryan symbolism, were used to distinguish Turkish racial theories.
In this way, the Sun Language Theory gained momentum and Ataturk the president completely supported this idea claiming that Turkish was the mother of all languages, and that Persian words and Arabic words did not need to be replaced as they were ultimately derived from Turkish. Thus, the state’s narrative shaped not just the work done in archaeology but how it was used to promote a nationalistic history. Like the Sun-Language Theory, this history was crafted by scholars who gained status by supporting the leader’s goals, and those who disagreed risked losing their positions. Essentially, historians and archaeologists had an incentive to fit their findings into the official story, and archaeology was used to back the state’s ideology.
After the death of Ataturk, the Sun-Language Theory faded into the background, joining other outdated ideologies like phrenology or eugenics. It became an embarrassing part of Türkiye’s history, a forgotten past, the outcome of a dictator’s whim.
Bibliography
İlker Aytürk. “Turkish Linguists against the West: The Origins of Linguistic Nationalism in Atatürk’s Turkey.” Middle Eastern Studies 40, no. 6 (2004): 1–25. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4289950.
Tachau, Frank. “Language and Politics: Turkish Language Reform.” The Review of Politics 26, no. 2 (1964): 191–204. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1405748.
Yilmaz Çolak. “Language Policy and Official Ideology in Early Republican Turkey.” Middle Eastern Studies 40, no. 6 (2004): 67–91. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4289953.
Featured Image Credit: Atatürk with his Panama hat just after the Kastamonu speech in 1925 via Wiki Commons
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