After last semester's cultural presentation, I was half-convinced to write a series of posts on the wild times of the early Turkish Republic’s hyper nationalism. One of my favorite areas are the Turkish Historical Thesis and Sun Language theory. Essentially, the Turkish Historical Thesis (TRT) stated that the Turks were the original inhabitants of Anatolia, and that the Hittites and Sumerians were proto-Turks. They eventually left Anatolia for Central Asia, and from there spread out again to bring civilization to Europe and China The Sun language theory is related to TRT and is essentially an attempt at creating goropisms (absurd etymologies) proving that modern words all descend from Turkic ones. Both of these theories are patently absurd and are rejected by all except a few fringe writers (websites following). While it’s easy to laugh at these theories, when looking at their contemporaries in American eugenics and Nazi racial science, they’re actually quite remarkable as an attempt by Turkey to combat European prejudices against Turkish academia and to create a place for Turkey in the world of intellectual history. As serious intellectual ideas, they don’t hold up, but as a piece of history, they fit into a broader story of Turkey emerging from the Ottoman Empire and trying to be embraced by the European community.
Sumerianturks.org
sunlanguagetheory.org
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