Prior to the ninth century, hordes of Turks had crossed the Volga River into the Black Sea steppes.[11] Originally, the House of Seljuq was a branch of the Qinik Oghuz Turks[12][13][14][15] who in the 9th century lived on the periphery of the Muslim world, north of the Caspian and Aral sea in their Yabghu Khaganate of the Oghuz confederacy,[16] in the Kazakh Steppe of Turkestan.[17] In the 10th century the Seljuqs migrated from their ancestral homelands into mainland Persia, in the province of Khurasan, where they mixed with the local population and adopted the Persian culture and language in the following decades.
The Oghuz (variously known as Ghuzz, Guozz, Kuz, Oguz, Oğuz, Okuz, Oufoi, Ouz, Ouzoi, Torks, Uguz, Uğuz, and Uz) were a group of loosely linked nomadic Turkic peoples. In the ninth century the Oghuz Turks from the Aral steppes drove the Pecheneg Turks of the Emba region and the River Ural toward the west. In the tenth century they inhabited the steppe of the rivers Sari-su, Turgai, and Emba to the north of Lake Balkhash of modern day Kazakhstan.[1] A clan of this nation, the Seljuks, embraced Islam and in the eleventh century invaded Persia, where it founded the Great Seljuk Empire.
