The word itself harks back to the name of one of the sons of Genghis Khan, Chagatai Khan (c. 1186 – 1242). As the second and supposedly favorite son of the world conqueror, he took part in the Mongol conquest of Turkestan. When the division of the empire was decided at the assembly Kuriltai in 1229, he was awarded as his apanage ulus the lands stretching from the Gobi Desert in the east to the Aral Sea in the west, and from the Altai Mountains down to the territory of modern Afghanistan. Notwithstanding its Mongolian name the language of this state, Chagatai, belongs to the Turkic family of languages. Chagatai was heavily influenced by Arabic and Persian and was usually written down using the Persian-Arabic alphabet. Compared to other research fields in Turkology, Chagatai is relatively unexplored, at least in Europe. The modern Turkic languages of Uzbek and Uyghur developed from this
language.
The Berlin State Library houses about 190 manuscripts in the Chagatai language. The Chagatai manuscripts reached the Berlin State Library from East Asia in a great variety of ways. After 1817 they were acquired by various emissaries, scholars, booksellers or antique dealers. Among them were Heinrich Friedrich von Diez (1751 – 1817), Julius Heinrich Petermann (1801 – 1876), Aloys Sprenger (1813 – 1893), Martin Hartmann (1851 – 1918) and Georg Huth (1867 – 1906). Most of the Chagatai manuscripts in the State Library’s possession come from the Hartmann Collection (133 titles), which Hartmann had assembled by 1905. Two objects from this collection were lost during World War II. Hartmann accumulated the manuscripts between 1902 – 1905 during his stay in Kashgar and Yarkand, the westernmost oases of today’s Xinjiang. A few of them are from Tashkent and Baku.
The manuscripts can be divided into the following genres: classical literature, hagiographic literature, religious writings, various Risalas that formulate rules of behavior for specific social groups, medical works and dictionaries. Some of the manuscripts in the State Library’s possession are bound simply in leather made of goatskin, cardboard or cloth. However, most of them have a leather binding with blind-pressed medallions, a lacquered and pressed cover, or a cover in the Persian style with an inset medallion.
You can get acquainted with other samples of ancient ceramics of Uzbekistan in the book-album "Collections of the Federal Republic of Germany" (volume XI) from the series "Cultural Legacy of Uzbekistan in the World Collections".
The main sponsor of the project is the oilfield services company Eriell-Group.
Have you heard of the Chagatai language?
Chagatai is a late medieval Turkic language that was widespread in Central Asia.