Some Remarks on the Oghuz Kaghan Epics

Mihály Dobrovits

(53rd Annual Meeting of the PIAC, St. Petersburg 2010)

The Oghuz Kaghan Epic is one of the oldest epic texts of the Turkic-speaking world. It has close connections with some other Altaic epic cycles as well as with the Islamic historiography. In our paper we shall compare three variants of the text:

1. the so called «Pre-Islamic variant» (14th century)
2. the manuscript of Uzunköprü (13th century)
3. the variant preserved in the work of Rashid ad-Din (14th century).

We shall try to give a detailed analysis of the texts and some remarks on the history of the epic, as well as on relations between these texts.