The 8th-century
Kul Tigin stela has the earliest instance of the term in
Old Turkic epigraphy:
Toquz Oghuz, the "nine tribes". Later the word appears often for two largely separate groups of the
Turkic migration in the early medieval period, namely: •
Onogur ("ten tribes") •
Utigurs •
Kutrigurs •
Uyghur •
Saragurs The stem
uq-, oq- "kin, tribe" is from a Proto-Turkic
*uk. The Old Turkic word has often been connected with
oq "arrow"; Pohl (2002) in explanation of this connection adduces the Chinese ''T'ang-shu'' chronicle, which reports: "the khan divided his realm into ten tribes. To the leader of each tribe, he sent an arrow. The name [of these ten leaders] was 'the ten
she', but they were also called 'the ten arrows'." An
oguz (
ogur) was in origin a military division of a
Nomadic empire, which acquired tribal or ethnic connotations, by processes of
ethnogenesis. ==See also==