their homeland was known as gutium (sumerian: ,"gu-tu-umki" or ,"gu-ti-umki"). there has been little scholarly support for theories linking the turkic names kutrigur and utigur to the gutians. widely believed to have spoken an indo-european (rather than turkic) language. iranologist w. b. henning proposed that the yuezhi were descended from the guti (gutians) and a closely associated but little known tribe referred to as the tukri (turki), who were native to the zagros mountains during the mid-3rd millennium bc. analysing the grammatical structure of the gutian language, german assyriologists benno landsberger, however, came to the conclusion that the gutians not only were closely related to turkic peoples, but most probably even identical.