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Journal of Sino-Western Communications （ISSN 1946-6188 ） Volume I Issue 1 December, 2009 On Cultural Relationships Between Old Turks and Iran Xu, Wenkan (The Publishing House of The Unabridged Chinese Dictionary, Shanghai, China) ABSTRACT: The Old Turks were influenced by the Iranian culture. According to Denis Sinor and other scholars, people of the Turkic empire in the Mongolian Plateau are a large aggregation of different ethnics, including the races speaking Iranian, Ugric and Samoyedic languages. Some of personal names, tribal names and dignitary titles in Old Turkic are neither Turkic nor Mongolian, rather derived from the East Iranian or Tocharian. The surname of Turkic royal clan “阿史那” corresponds to *Ashina in Sogdian, which is considered to be related to Iranian and Tocharian by the researchers such as Christopher Beckwith, I. N. Shervashidze, Sergei G. Kliashtornyi, Peter B. Golden in recent years. And the Indo-European-speaking races in Turpan, oasis of Tarim Basin and other places, such as Tocharians, Khotanese, Sogdians exerted a significant influence on the Old Turkic and the subsequent Uighur peoples in the aspect of culture. The Bugut Monument found in Mongolia in 1956 was built around AD 580 years or so, inscribed in Sogdian script on three sides. Liu Shiqing had been appointed to translate Buddhist scriptures Nirvana Sutra by Taspar, Turkic khan, at the end of the 6th century, which was recorded in History of Northern Qi . And the research of A. von Gabain and Louis Bazin indicates that the translation should be written in Sogdian. Furthermore, Manicheism was preached into Uighur and was established as state religion. The Uighur was further influenced by Sogdian culture and then created Uighur script based upon the cursive Sogdian alphabet. The paper is a comprehensive description of cultural relat