Turkish history thesis
The Turkish thesis of history ( Turkish: Türk Tarih Tezi ) was a pseudoscientific view of history supported by Ataturk in the 1930s , which postulated an early immigration of Turkic peoples to Anatolia . According to this, the high cultures of the Hittites and Sumerians are said to have been created by Turkic peoples or the aforementioned ancient peoples were of Turkish descent. The state-implemented thesis of history served the process of forming a Turkish national people and was a cornerstone of official historiography until Ataturk's death . The Turkish history thesis should serve as an antithesis to the European - Western history thesis. In the course of the state promotion and promotion of the thesis, great value was placed on archeology , which was further developed during these years.
Due to the desire to secure the fame of an ancient civilized people for the Turks, Ataturk let the assumptions of European scientists take up that a relationship between Sumerian and Turkish was possible. Later excavations by the German scholar Hugo Winckler in Boğazkale unearthed monuments of the Hittites. Here, too, the thought arose that the Turks had created architectural monuments that were later taken over by an Indo-European ruling class.
The historical thesis tried to prove that Anatolia has always been Turkish in order to justify a natural and historical right of the Turks to Anatolia, especially against other peoples such as the Greeks and Armenians . At first the Hittites were viewed as Turks, but the classification of the Hittite language as Indo-European refuted the previous classification.
Only the solar language theory , according to which all languages should be descendants of Turkish , made the state-sponsored and postulated Turkish descent of the Hittites obsolete.
swell
- M. Özdoğan, Ideology and archeology in Turkey. In: Lynn Meskell (ed.), Archeology under fire: nationalism, politics and heritage in the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East. London, Routledge 1998, 111-123.
- T. Tanyeri-Erdemir, Archeology as a source of national pride in the early years of the Turkish republic. Journal of Field Archeology 31/4, 2006, 381-393.