Book of Dede Korkut

The Book of Dede Korkut, also spelled as Dada Gorgud, Dede Qorqut or Qorqit ata, is the most famous epic stories of the Oghuz Turks. The stories have values important to the social lifestyle of the nomadic Turks and their pre-Islamic beliefs. The book's mythic story is part of the culture of Turkic states.  Some of those are Turkey, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan and to a smaller amount Kyrgyzstan."The book of my grandfather Korkut" (trans., intro and comments by V.Barthold, new ed., intro and comments by V.M.Zhirmunskiy and A.N.Kononov) // Moscow and Leningrad, USSR Academy of Sciences, 1962, p. 6

The stories were first told orally before they were written as a book. There are many versions of the stories. Many dates have been used for the first written copies. Geoffery Lewis dates it fairly early in the 15th century.Cemal Kafadar(1995), “in Between Two Worlds: Construction of the Ottoman states”, University of California Press, 1995.Michael E. Meeker, “The Dede Korkut Ethic”, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 24, No. 3 (Aug., 1992), 395-417. Cemal Kafadar said that it was no earlier than the 15th century.  Stanford Jay Shaw (1977) in his history of the Ottoman empire dates it in the 14th century.Stanford Jay Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, Cambridge University, 1977, pg 141.

References

Category:Asian mythology
Category:History books
Category:Epic poems
Category:Turkish culture