Mild spoilers for Kuruluş: Osman 115. Bölüm
I will take any opportunity I can get to re-post the following picture, because it’s one of my favourites on this blog. It’s the personal seal of Güyük Khan, grandson of Genghis, and 3rd Khagan-Emperor of the Mongolian Empire.
The inscription on the seal is written in the classical Mongolian script, and it reads as follows:1
möngke ṭngri-yin küčündür
(Under the power of the eternal heaven)Yeke Mongγol ulus-un dalai-in qanu ǰrlγ
(Great Mongol Nation's Oceanic Khan's Decree)Il bulγa irgen-dür kürbesü, büsiretügüi ayutuγai
(if it reaches people both subject or belligerent, let them revere, let them fear)
We know of this seal from Güyük’s letter to Pope Innocent IV in 1246. The letter itself is quite something,2 being a demand that the Catholic kingdoms of Europe submit to Mongol rule and pay homage to the Khan. The reason I’m quoting it today though, is that the opening line from Güyük’s seal (“under the power of the eternal heaven”) was actually featured in this week’s episode of Kuruluş: Osman.3
We’ve been told for some time that the Mongol commander Nayman is on his way with a huge army, and this week we finally get to meet him. His entrance scene is magnificent (Youtube link), an extended montage of mist and frothing horse. Also, the reins of his horse are a metal chain, which made me think he was going to look like this:
This amount of effort for his introduction suggests that Nayman will be a major character this season and possibly the final boss.
Let’s look a bit more closely at that first line as he speaks it (click the play button to hear it).4 Obviously, most of the audience will be Turkish speakers, and so the Middle Mongolian is partially translated so that the audience can understand him. Where the original seal reads “möngke ṭngri-yin küčündür”, the official ATV transcript of the spoken line is Turkish-ised to “mengü tengri küçündür”.
Although “mengü” seems to be a very obscure word in Turkish, perhaps viewers would be more familiar with its Old Turkish equivalent “beŋgǖ”, which is the source of the modern Turkish names Bengü/Bengi with the same meaning of “eternal”.5
Note that the Youtube subtitles transcription robot is unable to understand the spoken words at all, and leaves that line blank. This may be because the actor (Berik Aitzhanov) is from Kazakhstan, and is speaking with an accent (either deliberately or not). His pronunciation sounds more like “meng’ tengri guçundur”; i.e. the <ü> vowels and the palatal <k> have been velarised,6 or pronounced more toward the back of the mouth.
A native Turkish speaker would probably understand Berik’s accent just fine though. We know this because of Uzbek actor Maruf Otajonov, who played the Mongol commander Geyhatu in previous seasons of Osman. Maruf’s accent was so strong when speaking Turkish, that the producers of the show gave him hard-coded Turkish subtitles, to help out the viewers (Youtube example).
While Geyhatu is based on a historical person (he’s the grandson of Güyük’s cousin, i.e. his cousin twice-removed), Nayman appears to be purely fictional.
You can watch Kuruluş: Osman for free on ATV’s official Youtube channel.
Click the cogwheel under the video and select “Turkish” subtitles [not “Turkish (auto-generated)”], then click it again and select “autotranslate/English” if needed. Any problems with subtitles, see my guide here.
Transliteration and lightly-edited translation from Wikipedia, original source Paul Pelliot, Les Mongols et la papauté, Paris, 1923, pp.22-23.
The original letter (link to scanned copy) is in the Secret Archive of the Vatican, unfortunately now renamed to the Vatican Apostolic Archive which takes away all the mystery from the former name. I love the following comment at Wikipedia: “One study in 1969 stated that use of the term secret was merited, as the archives' cataloguing system was so inadequate that it remained "an extensive buried city, a Herculaneum inundated by the lava of time ... secret as an archeological dig is secret"“.
Anyway, finding a fully translated copy of the original letter is much more difficult than I had hoped so I gave up, but here are some references I’ll park here to try in the future: “Persian text in Pelliot, Les Mongols et la Papauté, p.17; French translation, ibid., p.20; English translation by J. A. Boyle […] in I. de Rachewiltz, Papal envoys to the Great Khans (London: Faber & Faber, 1971), p.213; German translation in Doerfer, Türkische und mongolische Elemente, vol 4, p.75.” Also, Wikisource has a Persian transcript here.
Kuruluş: Osman 115. Bölüm, starting at about 2:06:35
Kuruluş: Osman 115. Bölüm; timestamp 2:08:25
Especially since there’s a “Bengi Hatun” in this very season of Osman
I hope I understand the meaning of this word correctly! Apologies to any linguists.