Turkish Maps and Legends

Yesterday I helped a friend pack a container for moving, and the result of carrying hundreds of pounds of a tasteful book collection down two flights of stairs is aching hamstrings. These tender 'strings of mine reminded me, naturally, of the mountains and passes that comprise the heart of Inner Asia, especially since for light bedtime reading I've been working through Peter Hopkirk's corpus. This morning when I woke up rather too early for my lackadaisical tastes I finished off his Trespassers on the Roof of the World: The Secret Exploration of Tibet.

A lot of Westerners attempted to reach Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, by traveling through the extremely sparsely populated and desolate plain in the north of Tibet, the Chang Tang. The harsh climate and the eventual discovery of their parties usually defeated them before they were able to reach Lhasa, and in any case, the so-called race to Lhasa had been won by a Bengali, Sarat Chandra Das, one of the so-called native explorers, or pundits, trained in surveying.

In any case, thinking about the northern part of Tibet reminded me of something I stumbled on recently about Khotan. Kashgar would be usually be the gateway for any 19th century Western explorer who attempted to enter Tibet from the north or who wanted to explore the Tarim Basin, and when I recently did a Google search on Khotan, as I periodically do, I was somewhat surprised to find some new information that had been added to the wikipedia entry for the Kingdom of Khotan.

Under the sub-heading of Culture, there is this new (at least new to me) bit of information:

In his Diwanu Lughat at-Turk, the 11th century Turkish scholar Mahmud al-Kashgari included a verse describing the Muslim conquest of Khotan:

Like river torrents

We flooded their cities

We destroyed their monasteries

And shat on the statues of the Buddha.

Now I am certainly familiar with the Muslim conquest of Khotan in 1006, and I've been searching for references to it in Tibetan sources connected with the Western Tibetan kingdom of Ngari somewhat desultorily since the Qarakhanids were also active in Western Tibet and there seems to be some connection between Khotan and Ngari in resisting these incursions, but I had never seen this particular and unfortunately scatalogical reference. Further investigation via wikipedia reveals that Mahmud al-Kashgari wrote the first comprehensive dictionary of Turkic languages, the Dīwān ul-Lughat al-Turk (Arabic: Collection of Turkic words) in 1072. This, of course, is the source mentioned above.

But that's not all. There is a fascinating map in this text showing the distribution of Turkic tribes. Here is some more information on how to read the map.

Well, of course I had to look and see if there has been a translation of this text, and sure enough, after rummaging around on the Internet with my extreme flopping fish google-fu, I found this:

Maḥmūd Kāshgarī, 11th cent.

Türk şiveleri lügatı = Dīvānü Luġāt-it-Türk / Maḥmūd el-Kāşġarı ; inceleme, tenkidli metin,vİngilizce tercüme, dizinler, Robert Dankoff, James Kelly.

Duxbury, Mass. : Tekin, 1982-1985 (Printed at the Harvard University Printing Office)
3 v. : folded map ; 28-29 cm. + 7 microfiches (11 x 15 cm.). ( Doğu dilleri ve edebiyatlarının kaynakları ; 7. Türkçe kaynaklar ; 7 = Sources of Oriental languages and literatures. Turkic sources ; 7 )

Actually, it wasn't Google, but the good old Harvard Hollis Catalog. But don't discount the difficulty to find this reference though.

There was also this reference from my notes:

Mahmud al-Kashgari, Diwan Lugat at-Turk ("Turkic Lexicon"), translated with Introduction by Zifa-Alua Auezova and Index by Robert Ermers, Almaty "Daik-Press" 2005. ISBN 9965-699-74-7.

I'll probably have to scour the Interlibrary loan for that one though since I'm not sure where I stumbled across that reference. In any case, the vitriolic tone of the above passage from the "Turkic Lexicon" might provide another nugget or two of information about Khotan, something I'm always on the lookout for. I wonder if the city was named explicitly since the reference given in the wikipedia article is singularly uninformative and somewhat hard to find in the U.S.