Since the early 18th century, the Book of Dede Korkut has been translated into French, English, Russian and Hungarian.[21][22] However, it was not until it caught the attention of H.F. Von Diez, who published a partial German translation of Dede Korkut in 1815, based on a manuscript found in the Royal Library of Dresden,[23] that Dede Korkut became widely known to the West. The only other manuscript of Dede Korkut was discovered in 1950 by Ettore Rossi in the Vatican Library.[24] Until Dede Korkut was transcribed on paper, the events depicted therein survived in the oral tradition, at least from the 9th and 10th centuries. The "Bamsi Beyrek" chapter of Dede Korkut preserves almost verbatim the immensely popular Central Asian dastan Alpamysh, dating from an even earlier time. The stories were written in prose, but peppered with poetic passages. Recent research by Turkish and Turkmen scholars revealed, that the Turkmen variant of the Book of Dede Korkut contains sixteen stories, which have been transcribed and published in 1998.[25]
In 2018, the Gonbad manuscript was discovered. The first leaf of the Gonbad manuscript is missing. For this reason, it is not known how the name of the manuscript was recorded in writing.[26]
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 Chaghatai, which shows that the original work was written in the area between the Syr Darya and Anatolia, and later rewritten in Safavid Iran in the second half of the 16th century. It was later copied again in the same area in the second half of the 18th century during the Qajar dynasty.[18]
Dating the composition
Depiction of Gorkut Ata (Dede Korkut) in 2006 Turkmen coins.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,[27] with two layers of text: a substratum of older oral traditions related to conflicts between the Oghuz and the Pechenegs and Kipchaks and an outer covering of references to the 14th-century campaigns of the Aq Qoyunlu.[28] 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".[Note 1]
However, in his history of the Ottoman Empire, Stanford J. Shaw (1977), dates it in the 14th century.[Note 2] 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.[28] At least one of the stories (Chapter 8) existed in writing at the beginning of the 14th century, from an unpublished Arabic history, ibn al-Dawadari's Durar al-Tijan, written in the Mamluk Sultanate sometime between 1309 and 1340.[30]
A precise determination is impossible to come by due to the nomadic lifestyle of the early Turkic peoples, in which epics such as that of 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.[31] The majority of scholars of ancient Turkic epics and folk tales, such as Russian-Soviet academician Vasily Bartold and British scholar Geoffrey Lewis, believed that the Dede Korkut text "exhibits a number of features characteristic of Azeri, the Turkish dialect of Azerbaijan".[32]
