Historians have long characterised Ottoman political thoughts as being a synthesis of Islamic, Byzantine and Turkic statecraft traditions. In this book, Ayhan Biçak tries to understand the pre-Islamic notion of the state amongst the Turkic peoples using a philosophical approach. Studying three pre-Islamic Turkic texts – the Myth of Oguz Han, the Orhon Inscriptions and Kutadgu Bilig – Biçak draws conclusions about the structure of statecraft within the framework of the Turkic conception of the universe. Biçak places culture, that is the union of institutions, traditions and values, at the centre of determining how a state will be formed. Thus, he examines the pre-Islamic Turkic cultures and their thought as expressed in the texts, and how these influenced the types of Turkic states which emerged in Central Asia.