Oğuz Kağan Destanı: The Manuscripts That Chased a Legend

In the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris sits a manuscript written in Uyghur script, unassuming in appearance yet treated by scholars as the oldest surviving copy of the Oğuz Kağan Destanı — the epic that tells the life of Oğuz Kağan, the figure regarded as the legendary forefather of the Turks. No one knows precisely who copied it, where, or exactly when. The researcher Ferruh Ağca has argued that its linguistic features point to the late 14th or early 15th century, composed in the Chagatai linguistic zone under Mongol rule, blending Oghuz and Kipchak dialects.

The story the manuscript preserves reaches back further still. The Uyghur version of the Oğuz Kağan Destanı is connected to the Xiongnu, the great nomadic empire that dominated Inner Asia between 201 and 126 BCE, with some scholars suggesting that Oğuz Kağan corresponds to the historical ruler Mete. Zeki Velidi Togan pushed the epic's roots even earlier, tracing them to the Saka peoples of Central Asia in the 7th century BCE and, a few centuries later, to the Scythians — a lineage stretching across a millennium of steppe history before the tale was ever written down.

The Paris manuscript itself did not reach a wide audience until 1891, when the German Turkologist W. Radloff published its transcription alongside an edition of the Kutadgu Bilig. It was the first time modern scholarship could examine the epic's Uyghur text directly, though the mysteries of its origin remained unsolved.

Decades later, in the political and intellectual ferment of the early Turkish Republic, the physician and politician Rıza Nur took the epic in a different direction. He wove fragments of other legends into an expanded 6,100-line verse work titled Oğuznâme, published in Cairo in 1928. Among its passages was the text later known as 'Oğuz Kağan's Prayer,' which — through Rıza Nur's authorship — eventually came to be regarded by many as part of the Oğuz Kağan Destanı itself, blurring the line between ancient tradition and modern literary creation.

A more rigorous philological treatment arrived in 1932, when Willi Bang Kauf and Reşid Rahmeti Arat produced a fresh transcription of the Uyghur manuscript, published in Germany. Arat later translated the text into modern Turkish, publishing it in Istanbul in 1936. The epic reached an even broader Turkish readership in 1970, when Turkey's Ministry of National Education included it in its '100 Temel Eser' series, with Muharrem Ergin supplying an explanatory preface and the original Uyghur text alongside Ergin's edition, which was based on the Bang and Arat work.