We all have ancestors. Most of us also have family stories which bring life to the faces in old photographs: the tragic accident, the midnight elopement, the émigré uncle whose fortune was dissipated by his solicitors, etc. In all family lore, there is usually a significant grain of truth, no matter how distorted the later story has become. Why, then, should this not be true of the “dynastic myths” of the Ottomans? Proceeding on this basis, Rudi Paul Lindner's Explorations in Ottoman Prehistory are “exercises in emergency archaeology” (p. 118) seeking to recover whatever evidence of historical reality remains in the fifteenth-century Ottoman accounts of their origins: whether discredited due to apparent inconsistencies or simply neglected in the excitement of the long-running gazi debate, such evidence deserves re-assessment. Where Colin Imber sees mainly “black holes”, Lindner finds distortion, elaboration, sometimes fabrication, but also some essential grains of truth. What new light does this throw on the very early Ottomans?

Five topics are explored in this short book. The Ottomans' nomadic background is the subject of chapter one, and the question of when Osman's ancestors entered Anatolia. Whether they arrived in the eleventh century with the reputable Seljuks of Rum (as Köprülü believed) or in the thirteenth in association with the Mongols, had implications for early Ottoman legitimacy, of great significance to historians such as Neşri, writing in the late fifteenth century. Lindner's excavations suggest that Osman's ancestors – of disputed nomenclature and relatively undistinguished – may have been among the defeated Khwarezmian troops employed by the Seljuks after 1230 in an attempt to hold back Mongol forces. This neatly reconciles the Seljuk and Mongol theories of origin within a credible time scale. Chapter 2 emphasizes the political, military and economic significance of the Ottomans' first known base at Söğüd, in particular its comparatively rich agricultural environment which encouraged a degree of Ottoman settlement and the early policy priorities which increasingly led them away from their nomadic roots, well before the conquest of larger urban centres such as Bursa.

Chapters 3 and 4 attempt to clarify two ambiguities concerning early Ottoman relations with neighbouring polities. Fifteenth-century accounts stating that the Ottomans conquered Karacahisar around 1290 from the Byzantines are unreliable, but not entirely fanciful. If, as the geography of the region suggests, we substitute the Germiyanids for the Byzantines as the previous holders of the fortress, both early Ottoman aggression towards fellow Muslims and Turks, and the later cover-up, then become apparent. More unexpected and therefore more striking is the argument in chapter 4. Lindner suggests that an unusual rise in the minting of silver coinage throughout Anatolia in 699/1299–1300 resulted from Ilkhanid (i.e. Mongol) attempts to reward their Turkish vassals and to retain their loyalty following the unsuccessful revolt of a Mongol governor in the region. Some Mongol-style coins found in a hoard at Kütahya appear to bear the place name Söğüd. This leads Lindner to the tentative conclusion that the traditional “start date” of the Ottoman state was connected less with their gaining independence from Seljuk overlords, as the histories imply, and more with “an acceptance of Mongol overlordship” (p. 101), no matter how short-lived. This too, was an aspect of early Ottoman allegiance air-brushed out of the received narrative, and replaced by the legitimizing Seljuk inheritance.

There may be no secure dates in Ottoman history before 1302, but what is the significance of this one? Ostensibly, it is the date of the battle of Bapheus, near Izmit, where Osman's followers first defeated a sizeable Byzantine force and thus attracted the attention of the Byzantine historian Pachymeres. The battle occurred in an area some distance north of Söğüd; its surface value is simply as one in a chain of events marking the Ottoman rise. But by asking why and how Osman and his followers came to be in the area in the first place, Lindner (in chapter 5) sees the battle as marking another crucial stage in the gradual Ottoman move away from reliance on the mountain and steppe environment of the nomad towards the settled plains of the agriculturalist. In his view, the battle occurred when and where it did not because of an inevitable Ottoman expansion; rather, it was the culmination of a series of natural events over which the Ottomans had little control, i.e. the heavy rains and disastrous flooding of the river Sangarius in spring 1302 which swamped pastures and devastated flocks at the crucial lambing season, affecting both the wealth and the activities of the tribesmen. The Ottomans were pushed northwards in the search for plunder to make good their losses. The fertile land in which they found themselves encouraged settlement and agriculture at the expense of pastoralism, and a greater interest in capturing and holding urban centres.

It is probably fair to say that the admittedly tentative conclusions offered in this book are less important than the means of reaching them and the spirit of relentless enquiry with which Lindner probes his material. In this sense, the book achieves its aim of keeping open old questions rather than providing clear answers. In raking over the foundations of the dynastic myths once again, it may even succeed in bringing some elusive grains of truth slightly closer to the surface.