Turkic languages. The Old Uyghur Empire was a semi-nomadic Buddhist and Manichaean state that ruled in modern-day Mongolia between roughly the 740s and 840s CE. After the destruction of the Uyghur Empire by the Kyrgyz, many Uyghurs fled to the oasis city-states of eastern Central Asia, including Dunhuang. These Uyghurs played an important role in the rise of the Mongol Empire in the thirteenth century, when they provided scribes for the imperial administration. Much later, the word “Uyghur” came to refer to the Turkic-speaking Muslims who live in what is now Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region in the far northwest of China.