Intricate Genealogies: What is Said in the Epic Poem about Nogay People?
Authors: Duysen Quwatbek , Suıyerkul Botagoz , Nurmanova Marzhan 
Published: September 2024

This article examines communication blueprints of the Forty Knights of Steppe epic poem (original ti-tle in Kazakh "Қырымның қырық батыры"). The Forty Knights of Steppe is a cultural heritage of Turkic nations. The epic poem’s text is an assemblage of ballads that are connected with each other. It consists of thirty-five ballads and depicts relationships of around two hundred characters. The epic poem's events have a historical origin that links to the Nogay nobility from the Golden Horde period. The main event in the epic poem develops around Edige and his descendants. The historical aspect of this epic poem positions it with the paragons of heroic literature such as "Shahnameh" and "Manas". The epic poem’s text was first fully recorded in 1942 in Almaty by Muryn Zhyrau (real name 'Tilegen Sengirbekuly') by specialists from the Kazakh SSR Academy of Sciences. Unfortunately, the epic poem stayed unpublished for more than 60 years. The full text of the epic poem was published in 2005 after restoring the independence of the Republic of Kazakhstan. This research discovers the epic poem by analyzing their network. It focuses on mapping and visualizing links between characters described in the text. The authors used the methods of text mining, proposition, and semantic triangles for assembling information about contacts between characters into the databases. The databases include basic information, such as the names of characters and their contacts with other characters. The databases also contain information about the direction of every contact, relationship statuses of contactors, contactors' roles inside of genealogical lineage, kinship degrees of contactors inside their genealogies, and contactors' gender. In addition, the databases include information about the connec-tion of contactors to genealogies, and information about the contacts of contactors outside of their genealo-gies. All databases were built in spatial data analysis compatible format. The databases were launched through data visualization software by switching on the environmental settings required for this type of research. The authors used Gephi data visualization software for this research to visualize databases. The visualization shows an intricate communicative network that covers almost all characters. The visualization demonstrates two types of contacts between characters of the epic poem. The first type is a structured type of contacts. This type of contacts develops inside of genealogies. It is a common type of contacts in the epic poem, and it follows the hierarchical order. The second type is a class-based type of contacts. This type of contacts ties characters from different genealogies and does not correspond to the hierarchical order. However, this type of contacts depends on the characters' roles and statuses inside their genealogies. Thereby, the second type of contacts is connecting different genealogies into whole network. The types of contacts demonstrate two levels of social communication in the narration of the epic poem. Considering the visualization results and according to the historical origins of the characters, the authors argue that the text of the epic poem shows the patterns of social communication typical for Central Eurasian medieval nomad cultures in the Golden Horde period. On the other side, the stratification into two types of contacts may demonstrate the levels of bureaucracy in social communication in the same historical period. The authors suggest that the social networks of the epic poem describe the transitional form of the chiefdom society with communication levels typical for tribal and chiefdom societies. In general, the paper's authors suppose that the example of this research on the epic poem's communication structure may give more data to understand the correlation between language and society.