Törü, Kut and El in the Old Turkic political worldview: a contextual reconstruction and an symmetric comparison with the organization of Turkic states

Abstract

This article reconstructs the meanings and relations of törü, kut and el in selected Old Turkic political texts and asks how far those meanings can be placed in a disciplined comparison with the public institutional language of the Organization of Turkic States (OTS). Monumental inscriptions and a didactic mirror for princes do not record behaviour. The object of analysis is therefore the elite political worldview represented in the Kül Tegin and Bilge Khagan inscriptions and in Yusuf Khass Hajib’s Kutadgu Bilig, not the conduct of historical actors. The study combines philological close reading, contextualist intellectual history, conceptual history and comparative political theory. Its comparison is deliberately asymmetric: each historical term is first reconstructed by genre, collocation and narrative function; contemporary concepts are then used only to identify shared political questions, not as translations or evidence of equivalence. The analysis produces four findings. First, the Orkhon passages strongly attest the pairing of el and törü: political community and inherited normative order are narrated as jointly maintained, lost and restored. “Relational normative order” is proposed as an analytical description of this pattern, not as an Old Turkic expression. Second, kut is explicitly possessed and divinely favoured in the Kül Tegin formula “because I had kut, I became qaghan”; the inscriptions do not, however, describe a mechanism by which it is withdrawn. The Kutadgu Bilig develops the instability of Fortune and relates enduring rule to justice, counsel and wisdom, supporting a cautious interpretation of kut as conditionally conferred authorisation without establishing a formal theory of withdrawal. Third, el spans polity, people and ordered condition without corresponding exactly to the modern state, nation or society. Fourth, current OTS materials invoke Turkic history and tradition in describing the Council of Elders and employ the diplomatic language of shared past, mutual trust and respect. They do not use törü, kut and el as a conceptual cluster and do not establish transmission from the medieval texts. The comparison therefore demonstrates limited conceptual resonance and contemporary heritage self-presentation, while leaving generic institutional design, invented tradition and domestic instrumentalisation as viable explanations. The article’s contribution is a source-bounded method for bringing Old Turkic political thought into comparative theory without turning textual representations into behavioural evidence or modern institutions into proof of historical continuity.