The first empire to call itself Turk — a confederation of nomadic horse-warriors that erupted out of Mongolia around 552 CE and within a generation ruled the steppe from Manchuria to the borders of Persia and Byzantium. Founded by the Ashina clan under Bumin Qaghan, the Turkic Khaganate gave the name 'Turk' to history, opened long-distance diplomacy from China to Constantinople over the silk trade, and left the Orkhon inscriptions, the oldest surviving texts in any Turkic language. It helped define a model of steppe statecraft that later Turkic and Mongol powers would inherit and adapt.
For the first time in any surviving Turkic writing, a steppe people cut its own political memory into stone, in its own language: the Orkhon inscriptions of Mongolia, raised around 732, in which a dead king warns his people in the first person not to trade their freedom for Chinese silk and soft living. They are the founding words of the very people who gave the world the term “Turk.”