Tamga - Medieval Tamgas - Turkic Peoples

Turkic Peoples

The Turks who remained pastoral nomad kings in eastern Anatolia and Iran however, continued to use their clan tamgas, and in fact they became high-strung nationalistic imagery. The Ak Koyunlu and Kara Koyunlu, like many other royal dynasties in Eurasia, put their tamga on their flags and stamped their coinage with it.

For those Turks who never left their homeland of Turkestan in the first place it remained and still is what it was originally, a cattle brand and clan identifier.

Among modern Turkic peoples, the tamga is a design identifying property or cattle belonging to a specific Turkic clan, usually as a cattle brand or stamp.

When Turkish clans took over more urban or rural areas, tamgas dropped out of use as pastoral ways of life became forgotten. This is most evident in the Turkish clans who took over western and eastern Anatolia following the Battle of Manzikert. The Turks who took over western Anatolia founded the Sultanate of Rûm and became Roman-style aristocrats. Most of them adopted the (at the time) Muslim symbol of the Seal of Solomon after the Sultanate disintegrated into a mass of feuding ghazi states (see Isfendiyarids, Karamanids). Only the Ottoman ghazi state (later to become the Ottoman Empire) kept its tamga, and this was highly stylized, so much so that the bow was stylized down eventually to a crescent moon.

Tamgas of the twenty-two Oghuz tribes according to Mahmud al-Kashgari in Dīwānu l-Luġat al-Turk: