| Book of Dede Korkut | |
| Original Title: | Dresden manuscript: Kitāb-ı Dedem Ḳorḳud Alā Lisān-ı Tāife-i Oġuzān (The Book of my Grandfather Korkut according to the language of the tribe of the Oghuz)[1] Vatican manuscript: Hikāyet-ı Oġuznāme-ı Kazan Beġ ve Gayrı (The Story of Oguzname, Kazan Beg and the Others)[2] Gonbad manuscript: Cild-i Duyyum-i Kitāb-i Türkmän (ä)lsānî ("The Second Volume of the Book of the Turkmens")[3] |
| Language: | Oghuz Turkic |
| Subject: | The stories carry morals and values significant to the social lifestyle of the nomadic Turks. |
| Genre: | Epic poetry |
| Publication Date: | 14th or 15th century |
| Ich: | Heritage of Dede Qorqud/Korkyt Ata/Dede Korkut, epic culture, folk tales and music |
| Countries: | Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkey |
| Id: | 01399 |
| Region: | ENA |
| Year: | 2018 |
| Session: | 13th |
| List: | Representative |
The Book of Dede Korkut or Book of Korkut Ata (Azerbaijani: کتاب دده قورقود; Turkmen: Kitaby Dädem Gorkut; Turkish: Dede Korkut Kitabı) is the most famous among the dastans or epic stories of the Oghuz Turks. The stories carry morals and values significant to the social lifestyle of the nomadic Turkic peoples and their pre-Islamic beliefs. The book's mythic narrative is part of the cultural heritage of the peoples of Oghuz origin, mainly of Azerbaijan, Turkey and Turkmenistan.[4] Only two manuscripts of the text, one in the Vatican and one in Dresden, were known before a third manuscript was discovered in a private collection in Gonbad-e Kavus, Iran, in 2018.
The epic tales of Dede Korkut are some of the best-known Turkic dastans from among a total of well over 1000 recorded epics among the Turkic and Mongolian language families.[5]
Dede Korkut is a heroic dastan, also known as the Oghuznama among the Oghuz,[6] which starts in Central Asia, continues in Anatolia, and centers most of its action in the Caucasus.[7] According to Barthold, "it is not possible to surmise that this dastan could have been written anywhere but in the Caucasus".
The Dede Korkut is the principal repository of ethnic identity, history, customs and the value systems of the Oghuz throughout history. It commemorates struggles for freedom when the Oghuz were a herding people, although "it is clear that the stories were put into their present form at a time when the Turks of Oghuz descent no longer thought of themselves as Oghuz." From the mid-10th century on, the term Oghuz was gradually supplanted among the Turks themselves by Turkoman; this process was completed by the beginning of the 13th century. The Turcomans were those Turks, mostly but not exclusively Oghuz, who had embraced Islam and begun to lead a more sedentary life than their forefathers. In the 14th century, a federation of Turcoman tribesmen, the Aq Qoyunlu, established a confederation centered in eastern Turkey, Azerbaijan, Iraq and western Iran.
The twelve stories that comprise the bulk of the work were written down after the Turks converted to Islam, and the heroes are often portrayed as good Muslims while the villains are referred to as infidels, but there are also many references to the Turks' pre-Islamic magic. The character Dede Korkut, i.e. "Grandfather Korkut", is a widely renowned soothsayer and bard, and serves to link the stories together, and the thirteenth chapter of the book compiles sayings attributed to him.The historian Rashid-al-Din Hamadani (d. 1318) says that Dede Korkut was a real person and lived for 295 years; that he appeared in the time of the Oghuz ruler Inal Syr Yavkuy Khan, by whom he was sent as ambassador to the Prophet; that he became Muslim; that he advised the Great Khan of the Oghuz, attended the election of the Great Khan, and gave names to children.
The tales tell of warriors and battles and are likely grounded in the conflicts between the Oghuz and the Pechenegs and Kipchaks. Many story elements are familiar to those versed in the Western literary tradition.[8] For example, the story of a monster named Tepegöz "Goggle-Eye" bears enough resemblance to the encounter with the Cyclops in Homer's Odyssey that it is believed to have been influenced by the Greek epic or to have one common ancient Anatolian root. The book also describes in great detail the various sports activities of the ancient Turkic peoples:
The language of the Gonbad manuscript is of a mixed character and depicts vivid characteristics of the period of transition from later Old Oghuz Turkic to the Early Modern Turkic of Iranian Azerbaijan. However, there are also orthographical, lexical and grammatical structures peculiar to Chaghatai, which shows that the original work was written in the area between the Syr Darya and Anatolia, later rewritten in Safavid Iran in the second half of the 16th century and again in Qajar Iran in the second half of the 18th century. However, the manuscript also boasts a couple of Persian word groups, such as Dāvūd-ı nebī (Prophet Dawud), Şāh-ı merdān ("shah of the valiant", Ali), taḫt-ı Mıṣır (the throne of Egypt) and others.
The following sentences are a few of many sayings that appear in the Gonbad manuscript:
Text in original Oghuz Turkic language:
Allāhına güveneŋ yumruḳ ursa ḳara daġlar yıḫar.
Üstin ala bedirli ay gelende sıçramaḳa ḥamlelenür.
Tekebbürlik eyleyeni Taŋrı sevmez.
Kara saçuŋ dolaşmışını daraġ yazar.
Eger erdür eger ḫatun bu dünyāda nāmūslı ġayretli ḳoççaḳ gerek.
Yapa yapa ḳarlar yaġsa yaza ḳalmaz.
Ecel vaʿde ėrmeyince kimse ölmez.
Aġlamaġıla nesne mi olur?
English translation:
Those who trust in God can destroy even the black mountains if they punch them.
When the light of the full moon appears above, [the pied violent tiger] makes a move to leap.
God disdains the proud.
The comb can disentangle tangled black hair.
Whether man or woman, in this world one must have an honest and zealous heart.
If the flaky snow falls, it will not stay in the summer.
If one's dying day doesn't come, that person will not die.
What can be achieved by crying?
Since the early 18th century, the Book of Dede Korkut has been translated into French, English, Russian and Hungarian.[11] [12] However, it was not until it caught the attention of H.F. Von Diez, who published a partial German translation of Dede Korkut in 1815, based on a manuscript found in the Royal Library of Dresden,[13] that Dede Korkut became widely known to the West. The only other manuscript of Dede Korkut was discovered in 1950 by Ettore Rossi in the Vatican Library.[14] Until Dede Korkut was transcribed on paper, the events depicted therein survived in the oral tradition, at least from the 9th and 10th centuries. The "Bamsi Beyrek" chapter of Dede Korkut preserves almost verbatim the immensely popular Central Asian dastan Alpamysh, dating from an even earlier time. The stories were written in prose, but peppered with poetic passages. Recent research by Turkish and Turkmen scholars revealed, that the Turkmen variant of the Book of Dede Korkut contains sixteen stories, which have been transcribed and published in 1998.[15]
In 2018, the Gonbad manuscript was discovered. The first leaf of the Gonbad manuscript is missing. For this reason, it is not known how the name of the manuscript was recorded in writing.[16]
The language of the Gonbad manuscript is of a mixed character and depicts vivid characteristics of the period of transition from later Old Oghuz Turkic to Early Modern Turkic of Iranian Azerbaijan. However, there are also orthographical, lexical, and grammatical structures peculiar to Chaghatai, which shows that the original work was written in the area between the Syr Darya and Anatolia, and later rewritten in Safavid Iran in the second half of the 16th century. It was later copied again in the same area in the second half of the 18th century during the Qajar dynasty.
The work originated as a series of epics orally told and transferred over the generations before being published in book form. There are numerous versions collected of the stories. It is thought that the first versions were in natural verse since Turkish is an agglutinative language, but that they gradually transformed into combinations of verse and prose as the Islamic elements affected the narrative over time.
Various dates have been proposed for the first written copies. Geoffrey Lewis dates it fairly early in the 15th century, with two layers of text: a substratum of older oral traditions related to conflicts between the Oghuz and the Pechenegs and Kipchaks and an outer covering of references to the 14th-century campaigns of the Aq Qoyunlu.[17] Cemal Kafadar agrees that it was no earlier than the 15th century since "the author is buttering up both the Akkoyunlu and the Ottoman rulers".
However, in his history of the Ottoman Empire, Stanford J. Shaw (1977), dates it in the 14th century. Professor Michael E. Meeker argues for two dates, saying that the versions of the stories we have today originated as folk stories and songs no earlier than the 13th century and were written down no later than the early the 15th century.[17] At least one of the stories (Chapter 8) existed in writing at the beginning of the 14th century, from an unpublished Arabic history, ibn al-Dawadari's Durar al-Tijan, written in the Mamluk Sultanate sometime between 1309 and 1340.
A precise determination is impossible to come by due to the nomadic lifestyle of the early Turkic peoples, in which epics such as that of Dede Korkut passed from generation to generation in an oral form. This is especially true of an epic book such as this, which is a product of a long series of narrators, any of whom could have made alterations and additions, right down to the two 16th-century scribes who authored the oldest extant manuscripts. The majority of scholars of ancient Turkic epics and folk tales, such as Russian-Soviet academician Vasily Bartold and British scholar Geoffrey Lewis, believed that the Dede Korkut text "exhibits a number of features characteristic of Azeri, the Turkish dialect of Azerbaijan".
The majority of the Turkic peoples and lands described in the Book of Dede Korkut were part of the Soviet Union from 1920 until 1991, and thus most of the research and interest originated there. The attitude towards the Book of Dede Korkut and other dastans related to the Turkic peoples was initially neutral.
Turkish historian Hasan Bülent Paksoy argues that after Joseph Stalin solidified his grip on power in the USSR, and especially in the early 1950s, a taboo on Turkology was firmly established. He observed that the first full-text Russian edition of the Book of Dede Korkut, by Azerbaijani academicians Hamid Arasly and M.G.Tahmasib and based on the Barthold translation of the 1920s, was published on a limited basis only in 1939 and again in 1950. He asserts, "Turkic scholars and literati (who raised the same issues) were lost to the Stalinist 'liquidations' or to the 'ideological assault' waged on all dastans in 1950–52." According to Paksoy, this taboo of the early 1950s was also expressed in the "Trial of Alpamysh" (1952–1957), when "all dastans of Central Asia were officially condemned by the Soviet state apparatus".
Soviet authorities criticized Dede Korkut for promoting bourgeois nationalism. In a 1951 speech delivered at the 18th Congress of the Azerbaijani Communist Party, Azerbaijani communist leader Mir Jafar Baghirov advocated expunging the epic from Azerbaijani literature, calling it a "harmful" and "antipopular book" that "is shot through with the poison of nationalism, chiefly against the Georgian and Armenian brother-peoples."[18]
Nevertheless, the publication of dastans did not wholly cease during that period, as editions of Alpamysh were published in 1957, 1958 and 1961,[19] as they had been in 1939, 1941, and 1949;[20] the entry on dastans in the second edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (volume 13, 1952) does not contain any "condemnation" either.[21] Despite the liberalization of the political climate after the denunciation of Stalinism by Nikita Khrushchev in February 1956, the same "Barthold" edition of the Book of Dede Korkut was re-published only in 1962 and in 1977. Problems persisted until perestroika, when the last full edition in Azerbaijani was sent for publication on July 11, 1985 but only received permission for printing on February 2, 1988.
A 1975 Azeri film, Dada Gorgud, is based on the epic.[22]
In 1998, Azerbaijan and UNESCO nominated, and in 2000 celebrated, the "One thousand three hundredth anniversary of the epic poem Kitab-i Dede Qorqud".[23]
In 1999 the National Bank of Azerbaijan minted gold and silver commemorative coins for the 1,300th anniversary of the epic.[24] The epic culture, folk tales and music of Dede Qorqud has been included in the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity of UNESCO in November 2018.[25]