ཧོར།

I attended an interesting lecture today from a Japanese professor on the diplomatic ties between the Tibetan empire and other surrounding empires. It would seem that the timeline and series of events he drew is as follow: first the Tibetan empire was militarily and politically dominant over central Asia; then the Tang Chinese made military alliances with the 'Jang empire, Uighur (hor?), and other central Asian empires that lead to several serious defeats of the Tibetans; the Tibetans figured this out and secretly made peace agreements with the other empires (including Tang Chinese) and thereby breaking the Chinese "siege"; it was this series of peace treatises that encouraged the imperial support of Buddhism. The professor described it much more precisely and with dates however I believe that is the gist of it.

At any rate, what I want to get at is the term hor. The professor had given hor as a translation for Uighur which I found surprising. Usually hor is used to refer to the Mongols (text often talk about turning back the hordes of Mongols) and many Tibetans refer to themselves as hor since their ancestors where Mongols that settled in Tibet and assimilated (often around Nag chu and Brag mgo). I found the courage to ask him during the Q&A and he said that hor was indeed to describe Central Asian neighbors. I would still like to verify this further though.

I suggest that we need to understand the word hor relative to historical time period. It would be great if someone (maybe you?) could do a study on this word to reveal how it's use and what it refers to. Is it an indigenous term or was it borrowed from another language? Where does the first instance of it appear? Supposedly it is in the Dunhuang texts, but I'm not positive about that.

I feel tempted to suggest "Turk" or "Turkish" as a translation for hor but am now sure whether it's too inclusive a tranlsation or too exclusive.