JannissaryofByzantium
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(10/3/07 12:43 pm)
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The Codex Cumanicus
The Codex Cumanicus
Peter B. Golden (Edited by H. B. Paksoy)
I. INTRODUCTION
From the time of the appearance of the "European" Huns until the collapse of the Cinggisid khanates, the Ponto-Caspian steppe zone and as a consequence, to varying degrees, the neighboring sedentary societies, have been dominated by or compelled to interact intimately with a series of nomadic peoples. Although Scythian and Sarmatian tribes of Iranian stock had held sway here for nearly a millenium before the coming of the Huns and Iranian elements both in their own right and as substratal influences continued to have an important role in the ethnogenesis of the peoples of this region, the majority, or at least politically dominant element, of the nomads who became masters of these rich steppelands were Turkic. In the period after the Turk conquest of Western Eurasia in the late 560’s, until the Cinggisid invasions, the Turkic polities of the area all derived, in one form or another, from the Turk Qaganate.
Of these peoples, only the Khazars, the direct political successors of the Turks, produced a qaganate in the classical Turkic mold. The others remained essentially tribal confederations which, for a variety of reasons, did not feel the impetus to create a sturdier political entity, i.e. a state.
Those that were driven from the area into sedentary or semi- sedentary zones, such as the Hungarians ( a mixed Turkic and Ugrian grouping under strong Khazar influence ) and parts of the Oguz, under Seljuq leadership, did create states but along largely Christian (Hungary, Danubian Bulgaria) or Islamic (the Seljuqs) lines. These polities, whether full-blown nomadic states, such as Khazaria, or tribal unions, such as the Pecenegs, Western Oguz (Torks of the Rus’ sources) or Cuman- Qipcaqs, however great their military prowess and commercial interests, have passed on little in the way of literary monuments stemming directly from them in their own tongues. Khazaria, for example, which as a genuine state had a need for literacy, has left us only documents in Hebrew, reflecting the Judaization of the ruling elements. Indeed, their language about which there are still many unanswered questions, is known, such as it is, almost exclusively from the titles and names of prominent Khazars recorded in the historical records of neighboring sedentary states. The Balkan Bulgars who, living in close physical propinquity to and cultural contact with Byzantium and ruling over a Slavic majority to which they eventually assimilated, have left somewhat more in the way of scattered inscriptions in mixed Bulgaro-Greek (in Greek letters) and in mixed Slavo-Bulgaric.
Their kinsmen on the Volga who adopted Islam in the 10th century, have left a number of tomb-inscriptions (dating largely from the Cinggisid era, 13th-14th centuries) in a highly stylized, mixed Arabo-Bulgaric language in Arabic script. Volga Bulgaria, as an Islamic center, used, of course, Arabic as its principal language of communication with the larger world. The inscriptional material, it might be argued, bespeaks a long-standing Bulgaric literary tradition. But, in this respect, as in a number of others, Volga Bulgaria, which did form a state, in the forest- steppe zone ruling over a largely Finnic population and in which denomadization was well-advanced, was atypical.
What is interesting to note here is that unlike the Turkic peoples of Central Eurasia and Inner Asia ( the Turks, Uygurs, Qarakhanids ), the Western Eurasian Turkic tribes did not create significant literary monuments either in Turkic runic script, several variants of which were in use among many of them or in any of the other script systems that were available to them (Greek, Arabic, Hebrew and even Georgian). This seeming lack of literary ambition ( which may yet be disproved by archaeology) is probably to be attributed to the weak articulation of political organization among peoples such as the Pecenegs, Western Oguz and Cuman-Qipcaqs. Thus, it should come as no great surprise that one of the most significant literary monuments connected with the language of one of the dominant tribal confederations of the region, the Codex Cumanicus, was largely the work of non-Cumans. Before turning to the Codex itself, we must say something about the people whose language it describes.
The tangled knot of problems that revolves around the question of Cuman-Qipcaq ethnogenesis has yet to be completely unraveled. Even the name for this tribal confederation is by no means entirely clear. Western ( Greek and Latin ) and infrequently Rus’ sources called them Comani, Cumani, Kumani.
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