Chagatay
Chagatay, also known as Chaghatay, Chagatai or Jagataic, was the Turkic literary language of Central Asia in the fifteenth to early twentieth centuries, written in the Arabic or (in a few early manuscripts) the Uighur script. Some of the greatest works of Islamic literature were written in Chagatay, including the autobiography of the emperor Babur (1483–1530) and the poems of Navaʾi (1441–1501). Chagatay was also the language of the Khivan tradition of historiography, which spanned four centuries, and was the official chancery language of the khanate of Khiva (1804–1873).
The present name of the language is ultimately identified with the Mongol prince Chagatai (d. 1242), one of the sons of Genghis Khan, whose name in subsequent centuries came to be applied to the state centered on his original ulus, or portion of the Mongol Empire, including the Central Asian oasis region of Transoxania. Having outlasted the end of the Chagatai state and the rise of the Timurids (fifteenth century), the term Chagatai denoted the nomadic Turkic population of this territory, and later to some extent the Turkic literary language of the region, though Turki or Turk tili (Turk language) remained the usual native name for this language down to the first decades of the twentieth century. The designations Chagatay and Eastern Turkish were popularized in the nineteenth century by European Orientalists, some of whom restricted Chagatay to mean the classical language of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Soviet scholars have used the term Starouzbekskii iazyk (Old Uzbek language) to denote a group of spoken and written forms including Chagatay.
Over its entire history Chagatay could claim to unite, in a developed and flexible idiom, a widespread and diverse literate population from Khorasan to Kashgaria, and from European Russia beyond the Aral Sea to the steppes of Kazakhstan. Besides numerous works of poetry and fiction, writings in Chagatay include histories, biographies, religious literature and hagiographies, genealogies, geographical works, travels, various treatises (risalah), and a wide variety of documents and correspondence.
The Language
Chagatay is classified as a Central Asian Turkic language, with some linguistic traits related to Kipchak and Oghuz Turkic. Chagatay followed the Karakhanid (eleventh–thirteenth centuries) and Khorezmian (thirteenth–fourteenth centuries) literary languages in the Eastern Middle Turkic period. Its vocabulary was considerably enriched by borrowings from Persian and Arabic. The position of Chagatay as a precursor of the modern literary Uzbek and Uighur languages is assumed but has not been fully investigated.
Throughout the period of its use Chagatay coexisted with literary Persian. There were many bilingual writers, and most Chagatay authors adopted Persian and Arabic expressions extensively. Nevertheless, the language contributed to a distinctive Turkic ethnic consciousness in Central Asia. The fifteenth-century poet Navaʾi devoted his last composition, Muhakamat al-Lughatayn (Judgment of Two Languages, 1499), to a vigorous argument on the superiority of Turki (Chagatay) over Persian.
The Literature
With few exceptions, poetry in Chagatay was modeled closely upon Persian examples. The oldest surviving works of Chagatay belles lettres belong to the early fifteenth century. During this period, Sakkaki and Ataʾi wrote panegyrics and other court poetry for Timurid royal patrons, including Ulugh Beg (1394–1449). Some poems in the single divan (collection) of Ataʾi record Turkic proverbs, adages, and folk meters. Lutfi (1370?–1460?) was a master of the tuyugh, a difficult native Turkic quatrain form with an aaba rhyme scheme in which the rhyming words must all be homonyms. Mir ʿAli Shir Navaʾi, or Navaʾi, wrote in both Chagatay and Persian, though his Chagatay works earned greater renown. Navaʾi brought the Chagatay language to its full development as a mode of literary expression and presided over its classical era. Among his numerous works in all genres are four divans, a five-part cycle of verse tales (mathnavi) entitled Khamsah, a translation from Persian of a Sufi hagiographic work by his friend the poet Jami (1414–1492), and Muhakamat al-Lughatayn. One of the most important sources on Timurid society is Navaʾi's biographical compendium in Chagatay, Majalis an-Nafaʾis (Assemblies of Refined Men, 1490/1), which gives biographies and literary samples from over four hundred men of letters, many of whom Navaʾi knew. It is virtually the only source of information on the lives of the forerunners of Navaʾi in Chagatay literature. The emperor Zahir ud-Din Muhammad Babur, founder of the Mughal dynasty in India, was also a celebrated author. His memoir, the Babunameh (Book of Babur), is treasured as a work of biography for its lucid depiction of events in the life of a compelling historical personality. Babur also wrote excellent poetry. His divan contains all types of the poetic art characteristic of his times, including examples of the virtuosic tuyugh quatrain. Chagatay poetry continued to be composed down through the era of the nineteenth-century khanates of Khiva and Quqon, though the artistic ideal was generally imitative.
Perhaps the most popular and influential work of religious literature in Chagatay was a divan of prayers and hymns supposed to be the work of the famous twelfth-century Sufi Hoja Ahmad Yasavi, though the collection is known only from much later manuscripts. The genre of Islamic hagiography (stories of the lives, works, and lineages of holy men) also produced several original works in Chagatay.
The oldest histories in Chagatay were produced for the early Shaybanid Uzbek rulers, whose invasions from the steppes drove the Timurids from power at the beginning of the sixteenth century. The Zubdat al-Athar (Cream of Annals, after 1525) by ʿAbdallah Nasrallahi was the first example in Chagatay of the Islamic general history. Subsequently, Chagatay historiography was written mostly in Khiva, and to a lesser extent Quqon. The Khivan king and historian Abu'l Ghazi Bahadur Khan (1603–1663) wrote his general history, Shajarah-i Turk (Genealogy of the Turks), by himself because, he said, he could find no one else in his realm who was qualified to do so. This book was one of the first Central Asian historical works to become known in Europe. In the nineteenth century, Khivan historians beginning with Shir Muhammad Munis (1778–1829) wrote an uninterrupted series of original works that chronicled the rulers of the country, the Qongrat dynasty (eighteenth century–1873). One of the last works in late Chagatay was Muhammad Yusuf Bek Bayani's Khwarizm Tarikhi (History of Kwarizm [Khiva], 1921), which, though written in medieval manuscript form, featured the innovated use of punctuation, apparently in imitation of Russian writing.
In the 1920s, the Soviet government's intensive efforts to construct and promulgate an Uzbek literary language finally supplanted Chagatay, and the latter disappeared from use. The Chagatay documents in the archives of the khanate of Khiva (preserved in Saint Petersburg, Russia) remain a valuable and largely untouched body of source material on the history of medieval Central Asia.
Further Reading
Aboul-Ghazi Behadour Khan. (1871–1874, 1970) Histoire des Mongols et des Tatares. Trans. by Petr I. Desmaisons. St. Leonards, U.K.: Ad Orientem and Amsterdam: Philo Press.
Babur, Zahiru'd-din Muhammad, Padshah Ghazi. (1922) The Babur-nama in English. Trans. by Annette S. Beveridge. London: Luzac.
Bodrogligeti, András J. E. (2001) A Grammar of Chagatay. Languages of the World/Materials, no. 155. Munich: Lincom Europa.
Browne, Edward G. (1920, 1928, 1964) A Literary History of Persia. Vol. 3, The Tartar Dominion (1265–1502). Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
Eckmann, János. (1965) "Die tschaghataische Literatur (Chagatay Literature)." In Philologiae Turcicae Fundamenta (Fundamentals of Turkic Philology) 2, edited by Louis Bazin, et al. Wiesbaden, Germany: Franz Steiner Verlag, 304–402.
——. (1966) Chagatay Manual Indiana University Uralic and Altaic Series, no. 60. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press
Hofman, Henry F. (1969) Turkish Literature: A Biobibliographical Survey. Section 3. Moslem Central Asian Turkish Literature, Being in the Main a List of 'Chaghatayan' Authors and Works in 'Chaghatay' as Registered in Professor M. F. Koprulu's Article: 'Cagatay edebiyati', IA. Vol. 3. With Some Additions (Navaʾiana, However, Excepted). Utrecht, Netherlands: University of Utrecht/Royal Asiatic Society.
Menges, Karl H. (1995) The Turkic Languages and Peoples: An Introduction to Turkic Studies. 2d ed. Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz Verlag.
Mir Ali Shir. (1966) The Muhakamat al-Lughatai (Judgment of Two Languages). Trans. by Robert Devereux. Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill.
Munis, Shir Muhammad Mirab and Muhammad Riza Mirab Agahi. (1999) Firdaws al-Iqbal: History of Khorezm. Trans. by Yuri Bregel. Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill.
Pavet de Courteille, Abel. ([1870] 1972). Dictionnaire Turk-Oriental: Destinée principalement à faciliter la lecture des ouvrages de Bâber, d'Aboul-Gâzi, de Mir Ali-Chir Nevâï, et d'autres ouvrages en langues touraniennes (Eastern Turkish Dictionary: Intended Primarily to Facilitate the Reading of the Works of Babur, Abu'l Ghazi, Mir ʿAli Shir Navaʾi, and Other Works in Turanian Languages). Amsterdam: Philo Press.
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