15 - Turkish literature

Summary

Introduction

The language(s) and literatures of Turkic peoples, spread over a large geography on the Silk Route, have been written with a variety of scripts over the centuries. After they were introduced to Islam traditional Turkic (mostly oral) literature and its forms and themes continued, while new literary forms and lexicons were adopted from the Persian/Arabic Islamic traditions. The two traditions did not exclude one another. At times they could have the same audience, and sometimes the authors created in both traditions. The written evidence of the pre-Islamic literary tradition of the Turkic peoples, who were latecomers to Islam, dates to the eighth century CE: the Orkhun inscriptions in today’s Mongolia. This is followed by manuscripts of Buddhist and Manichaean religious literatures, which developed in the Tarim basin up to the thirteenth century and were written in Uighur, Manichaean, Brahmin and other scripts. Other information about Turkic literary forms and themes of their literatures before Islam comes from Persian and Arabic sources as well as Turkic sources in later centuries.