Portal:Literature/Selected article archive/June 2006

Turkish literature is the collection of written and oral texts composed in the Turkish language, either in its Ottoman form or in less exclusive literary forms, such as that spoken in the Republic of Turkey today. The Ottoman Turkish language, which forms the basis of much of the written corpus, was heavily influenced by Persian and Arabic and used a variant of the Perso-Arabic script.

The history of Turkish literature spans a period of nearly 1,500 years. The oldest extant records of written Turkish are the Orhon inscriptions, found in the Orhon River valley in central Mongolia and dating to the 8th century. Subsequent to this period, between the 9th and 11th centuries, there arose among the nomadic Turkic peoples of Central Asia a tradition of oral epics, such as the Book of Dede Korkut of the Oghuz Turks—ancestors of the modern Turkish people—and the Manas epic of the Kyrgyz people.

Beginning with the Seljuks in the 11th century, the Oghuz Turks began to settle in Anatolia, and in addition to the earlier oral traditions there arose a written literary tradition heavily influenced by Arabic and Persian literature. For the next 900 years, until shortly before the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1922, the oral and written traditions would remain largely separate from one another. With the founding of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, the two traditions came together for the first time.