ABSTRACT
This is the beginning of a text written in Old Uighur script and preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris (MS Turc 1001). The text, called The Legend o f Oguz Qagan or The Book o f Oghuz (Oguzname), is one of the earliest of a series of mostly historical texts on the origin of the Turkic tribes, and in particular the Oghuz. It is fraught with linguistic, philological, historical, and literary problems, some of which have been solved by a long line of editors, translators, and commentators.2 Other problems, however, remain, such as the date of the text, its linguistic and tribal affiliation (does it belong to the Uighurs, the Kazakhs, the Southwest Turks, or to all of them?),3 *as well as its poetic form. According to A. M. âôerbak the text in the Paris MS
is a 15th-century copy of a text which goes back to the turn of the 13th to the 14th century and was probably written in Turfan.4
