The Story of Joseph: A Fourteenth-Century Turkish Morality Play by Sheyyad Hamza

Afterword

123 Afterword Hamza’s “Story of Joseph” was composed in a language called Old Anatolian (or Old Ottoman) Turkish, from which the language of modern Turkey evolved. Turkish belongs to the Turkic language group, which includes languages like Uzbek, Kirghiz, Turkmen, and Uyghur, with large numbers of speakers from Europe to northeast Asia. That group in turn is a member of the Altaic language family, making it (in the view of many) a relative of the Mongol and Tunguz language groups. Some scholars believe “Proto Turkic” was related to Korean or Japanese , or both.1 As an Altaic language, Old Anatolian Turkish was structurally different from both Arabic and Persian, members , respectively, of the Semitic and Indo-European language families. The oldest surviving examples of a Turkish language (“Old Turkic”)—apart from isolated words cited in Chinese and Byzantine sources—date from the eighth century ce. They are in the form of inscriptions on funerary stones (stele) carved in so-called runic (or “runiform”) characters.2 These monumental stones, celebrating the deeds of early Turkish rulers, are found in the Orkhon and Yenisey river valleys, north of the Altai mountain range in what is today Mongolia, an area generally 124 ✹ The Story of Joseph accepted as the oldest historic Turkish homeland. In terms of content, these inscriptions are also the earliest surviving examples of Turkish narrative. Speakers of Old Turkic mostly practiced pastoral nomadism and, although the evidence is sparse, probably followed animistic or shamanistic religious practices. But that language and that cultural setting would already have seemed archaic in Hamza’s time.3 While the Inner Asian homeland of the Turkish-speaking peoples lay north of the Altai mountains, the important regions controlled by their earliest empires lay further south, astride ancient caravan routes that connected the Mediterranean world to China. These routes, later to be known collectively as the “Silk Road,” facilitated not only trade but the exchange of ideas and religions. Over the course of time, especially from the time of their earliest steppe (Kök Türk) empire, Turks were exposed to and sometimes adopted the beliefs and practices of those several communities of faith—Buddhism, Zoroastrianism , Manichaeism, Judaism, and Christianity (primarily in its Nestorian form)—that were represented in Inner Asia. Turkish conversion to the teachings of those major historical religions of Eurasia is documented not only by reports of successful missionaries , foreign emissaries, and others but by writings of the new converts themselves, in Old Turkic but mostly in other alphabets.4 Those religious texts (primarily Buddhist, Manichaean, and Christian), now scattered and often fragmentary, provide a record—however partial—of the impact that those religions had on Turkish speakers across Central Asia. Conversely, it is those texts that, excepting the inscriptions of the stele, account Afterword ✹ 125 for the bulk of writing in Old Turkic, only very broadly what we would call literature. An educated elite largely monopolized literacy, and in a pre-print age that elite consisted mainly of religious scholars.5 Alongside this religious literature, the indigenous culture of the Turks nurtured a parallel oral tradition that perpetuated historical memory, celebrated collective wisdom , and preserved popular cultural values. Without writing, however, this tradition could not be known to outsiders. In seventh-century Arabia, a new prophet had appeared, calling tribesmen and townspeople around Mecca and Medina to a new faith—a religion that recognized much of the older biblical teaching but aimed to restore a purity of belief. By the ninth century ce, armies of Arabs and other recent Muslim converts had spread across Iran and deep into Central Asia.6 Last on the scene of the great world religions, Islam was always a strongly proselytizing faith. Such missionary activity undoubtedly won some Turkish converts as early as the eighth century. But Islam’s most dramatic success in Turkish Central Asia was probably the conversion, in the middle of the tenth century, of the ruler of a confederation of Turkish tribes known collectively as the Karakhanids, and with him “two hundred thousand tents.”7 While the older religions gradually lost adherents in Central Asia, Islam spread rapidly. And with it, Turkish influence in the Muslim world grew. Turkish manpower undergirded several dynasties, Turkish and non-Turkish alike, in the ensuing centuries. The conversion of a tribal or confederation leader like the just-mentioned Karakhanid ruler would initially have been followed by at least superficial education in the precepts of...