NOTES ON SOME TURKISH NAMES IN ABU 'L-FADL BAYHAQĪ'S TĀRĪKH-I MASʿUDI

Abstract

Islamic historians, at home in Arabic and Persian, have tended to ignore or to skate over Turkish linguistic and other elements which they have come across in the Arabic and Persian chronicles. Most of the early copyists of the manuscripts of such chronicles were ill-equipped to render Turkish linguistic materials in the first place. Certainly, many wrote under dynasties whose ruling strata were Turkish, since at various times, rulers who were ethnically Turkish in origin were to be found right across the Islamic world, from Algiers to Bengal, from Yemen to Siberia, but such Turkish-directed states in the Arab-Persian heartlands usually depended on an administrative and secretarial classes whose working languages would be Arabic or Persian. Not until the Ottoman sultanate developed its own Turkish cultural and literary traditions from the later fifteenth century onwards, and not until Chaghatay emerged as a flexible and expressive literary medium in the fifteenth century under the Chaghatayids and Timurids, did Osmanll and Chaghatay Turkish come into their own as literary media, and the secretarial class in the lands where these tongues flourished had to add to its ancient mastery of Arabic and Persian a sound knowledge of Turkish, i.e. Turkish was no longer essentially, as it had earlier been, an oral means of communication among the Turkish military and governing classes. Before the early twentieth century, European scholars, faced with Turkish names and titles in the Arabic and Persian historical and literary texts before them, had only inadequate means for elucidating these. Outside the Ottoman Turkish realm, the two standbys for reference were M. Pavet de Courteille's Dictionnaire turc-oriental, destine principalement a faciliter la lecture des ouvrages de Baber, d 'Aboul-Gazi et de Mir-Ali Chir-Nevai (Paris