page_title: Book of Dede Korkut
section_title: Dating the composition
hierarchical_section_title: Book of Dede Korkut / Origin and synopsis of the epic / Dating the composition
caption_attribution_description: Русский: Памятная монета Туркменистана
context_page_description: The Book of Dede Korkut or Book of Korkut Ata is the most famous among the 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 Turkic origin, mainly of Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Turkmenistan.
  Only two manuscripts of this book, Vatican and Dresden, were known until 2018. However, a new epos was added to this book with the discovery of Gonbad manuscript. 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 Eastern Turkic, which shows that the original work was written in the area between Syrdarya and Anatolia, and later rewritten in Safavid Iran in the second half of the 16th century. It was later copied again in the second half of 18th century in Qajar period in the same area.
context_section_description: 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 Pecheneks and Kipchaks and an outer covering of references to the 14th-century campaigns of the Akkoyunlu Confederation. 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 Jay 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. At least one of the stories (Chapter 8) existed in writing at the beginning of the 14th century, from an unpublished Arabic history, Dawadari's Durar al-Tijan, written in Egypt some time between 1309 and 1340.
  A precise determination is impossible to come by due to the nomadic lifestyle of the early Turkic people, in which epics such as 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, believe that the Dede Korkut text "exhibits a number of features characteristic of Azeri, the Turkish dialect of Azerbaijan".
caption: Depiction of Gorkut Ata (Dede Korkut) in 2006 Turkmen coins.
exif: {}