Written by Ami John
In 1923 with the foundation of Türkiye as a republic and Atatürk 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: to resist 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.
These goals emerged from a specific intellectual climate. Dominant European historical frameworks of the period treated civilisation as essentially a Western possession, with other cultures placed at its margins or excluded altogether. The Turkish Historical Thesis and, later, the Sun Language Theory were in part a deliberate challenge to this order – an attempt to reclaim historical agency for a people whose Ottoman past had been framed, by outsiders and reformers alike, as something to be overcome. That the methods ultimately proved pseudoscientific does not erase the legitimacy of the underlying impulse.
Thus, the whole idea was to rewrite history in order to forge a unified past for the diverse people of this new nation, with a language stripped of foreign influence, especially breaking from Arab and Persian. Following this model, the Turkish Historical Thesis, introduced in 1930 in An Outline of Turkish History, aimed to replace both Ottoman and Eurocentric world histories, which had viewed progress as a series of migrations culminating in European and American civilisation. In their place, the thesis proposed a narrative of Turkoman migration from Central Asia 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 civilisations of Mohenjo Darro and Harappa. Turkish migrations then moved westward along two main routes: a northern route through the Ural Mountains and Caspian Sea to the Black Sea coast and Thrace, and a southern route to Mesopotamia, Anatolia, the Italian Peninsula (as the Etruscans), the Aegean islands, Greece, and Egypt (as the Sumerians and Elamites). The Thesis notably claimed civilisations with unclassified languages – Sumerian, Etruscan, and Hittite – as Turkic in origin.
Linguistic congresses in 1932 and 1934 presented articles with a dual aim: to link Turkish with ancient unclassified languages such as Sumerian, Hittite, and Etruscan, and also with Indo-European and Semitic languages. Underlying much of this framework was the goal of nationalising language, a core objective of Atatürk’s “Pure Turkish” movement. Artin Cebeli, a teacher in Istanbul, emphasised 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, presented it as the solution to the Pure Turkish dilemma: how had primitive humans first discovered language as they transitioned from animal instinct to higher consciousness? According to Dilmen, early humans focusing on the sun as a divine power would have first uttered “a,” the simplest phoneme, requiring no lip movement. An elongated version produces “ag,” where “g” in Turkish signifies vowel elongation. What Dilmen did not address was that “ag” in modern Turkish means “net,” not “sun.” The implication was that it was not modern Turkish but the primeval tongue of the Turks that was the original language – supported by claims of the cultural and racial superiority of Central Asian Turks who had spread language across the ancient world. Dilmen outlined that sounds could be modified by adding ag-like phonemes in an agglutinative process, similar to modern Turkish. This was presented as an anti-imperialist linguistic framework, though the legitimacy of that impulse did not make the theory linguistically sound.
However, never in our history has there been an attempt to create a new language.
This connection between the sun and language in Türkiye was not just rooted in ancient myth but in the country’s modern history. In 1935, Remzi Oguz Arik led the excavation of Alacahöyük, a Hittite site between Çorum and Ankara. The discoveries were not headline-making, but when they reached a depth of about 6 metres, Arik noted the emergence of bronze, iron, and silver objects which they called “solar disks.”
This fell in line with the Turkish Historical Thesis linking the Sumerians to Anatolia. Archaeological finds including swastika symbols added to this: a 1935 Cumhuriyet article reported Turkish observers noting a Uygur mosaic with a swastika in Berlin, linking it to Central Asia. Two discs found at the excavation site were interpreted as solar symbols. These discoveries, while touching on Aryan symbolism, were deployed to distinguish Turkish racial theories from those emerging in Nazi Germany.
In this way, the Sun Language Theory gained momentum, and Atatürk completely supported the idea, claiming that Turkish was the mother of all languages, and that Persian and Arabic words did not need to be replaced as they were ultimately derived from Turkish. The state’s narrative shaped not just the archaeological work undertaken but how findings were mobilised in service of a nationalistic history. Scholars gained status by supporting the leader’s goals, and those who disagreed risked losing their positions. Historians and archaeologists had an incentive to fit their findings into the official story, and archaeology was instrumentalised in service of state ideology.
After the death of Atatürk, the Sun Language Theory was quietly shelved, its pseudoscientific claims no longer defensible as linguistics matured as a discipline. What remained was a more complicated legacy: the desire to contest Eurocentric historical narratives had been channelled into a theory that could not withstand scrutiny, and the scholarly coercion that sustained it had done a disservice to the very history it claimed to recover. Understanding the Sun Language Theory means holding both of these realities at once; the comprehensible political impulse, and the intellectual failure that resulted.
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
Retrospect Journal 
