Mahmud Kashgari

Kashgari Mahmud, son of Hussein, grandson of Muhammad, is a representative of the science and culture of the Turkic-Muslim Renaissance of the peoples of the Karakhanid Khaganate. He was born around 1029-1038 in the city of Barskan (modern-day Barskoon in the Jeti-Oguz district of the Issyk-Kul region) in the family of a regional ruler of the Karakhanids. He died after 1077. He studied in Barskan, Kashgar, and other centers of Muslim scholarship.

Between 1072 and 1077, he wrote an encyclopedic work in Arabic titled “Diwan Lughat at-Turk” - “Dictionary of Turkic Languages”, which included an original round map of the world representing the worldview of the Tengri-Tuu peoples (with Lake Issyk-Kul and the Ala-Tuu mountain system marked as the center of the earth).

The “Diwan” contains a rich collection of terms, proverbs, sayings, poems, and fragments of epic tales not only from the Turkic peoples of the Karakhanid Khaganate but also from other Turkic ethnic groups. It represents a multifaceted study of grammar, folklore, ethnography, historical geography, and onomastics of the Turkic world.

Another linguistic work, “Essences of Syntax in Relation to Turkic Languages,” has not survived to this day.



Reading this preface in Turkish and English, one cannot help but admire the fate of this book, which is a gem of the scientific creation of the Turkologist-encyclopedist of the 11th century.

The author's manuscript was calligraphically copied by Muhammad ibn Abubekr as-Sawi in Damascus 200 years later (in 1260). This unique copy of the book, miraculously preserved for 8 centuries in Asia Minor, is now kept in the National Library in Istanbul; it was discovered only in 1915 by the Turkish scholar Ali Emiri. In 1941, the Turkish Linguistic Society published the first facsimile edition, prepared by Besim Atalay.

A second (colored) facsimile edition of the book was published in 1990 by the Ministry of Culture of Turkey.