Following on from Rachael Griffiths’s recent summary of digital resources for Central and South Asian studies, I’d like to dive deeper on the topic of digital resources for Central Asian manuscripts and texts: specifically, Turki, Eastern Turkic, or Chaghatai materials.
In the past, The Digital Orientalist has featured numerous posts introducing digital libraries and archives, in text or in scans. To give some examples: for Arabic, there’s Theodora Zampaki’s two part interview with Professor Sarah Savant about the KITAB project (here and here), and Maksim Abdul Latif’s article on al-Shamila. For Persian, Shiva Mihan has provided overviews of useful digital resources here and here. For Syriac there is Ephrem A. Ishac’s interview with Professor James E. Walters. For Ottoman studies, there is Emine Turkmen’s introduction to the Digital Ottoman Corpora, and Fatma Aladağ’s articles on Ottoman Turkish search engines and an online platform dedicated to Digital Ottoman Studies. Rachael Griffith’s has also written separately on Tibetan resources available on rKTs. Finally, for Sanskrit, Udita Das guest wrote a beginners guide to digital tools and resources.
Other posts have taken a geographical instead of linguistic approach, with one focusing on the medieval eastern Islamicate world – in very general terms, Afghanistan and Central Asia between the 8-13th centuries – and another on materials from Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia. Since I study Turki/Chaghatai manuscripts and texts, I thought it would be helpful if I could share some of the resources I know about as well.
Chaghatai is an eastern Turkic language that acted as the literary Turkic language (the main literary language being, of course, Persian) in what is now Tatarstan, Central Asia and Xinjiang. It has a slightly different grammar compared to its westerly cousin Ottoman Turkish (being agglutinative languages, this means that Chaghatai’s suffixes and conjugations look slightly different from Ottoman), but shares a lot of similar vocabulary. This is great news for Ottomanists because it means that with only a teensy bit of training (say, with Eric Schluessel’s free-to-download Introduction to Chaghatay (2018)) they could access a whole new world of Turkic sources. What’s more, many Chaghatai writers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries – particularly Tatars – were strongly influenced by the Ottoman Turkish language, so one does not even have to fully understand Chaghatai grammar to read some of these sources.
Since most libraries tend to use “Chaghatai” or “Chaghatay”, I will be using only these terms from here on, but it is worth keeping in mind that in other academic mileux in the field of Turkic and Central Asian studies this language is sometimes called Turki, Eastern Turkish, or even Old Tatar, Old Uzbek, or Old Qazaq. We also shouldn’t forget that the namesake of this language – Chaghatai, the second son of Chinggis Khaan – is known in his native Mongolian as Chaghadai, or Tsagadai in the modern pronunciation, with a d and not a t at the end. In short, I hope that you will keep an open mind about names for this language, while recognizing that most libraries today continue to use some variant of the name “Chaghatai”.
Below is a list of digital resources of Chaghatai texts, both in print and in manuscript form.
Digital collections in Central Asia
Bizdin
Regional affiliation: Kyrgyz, but honestly quite varied.
Books and manuscripts: 567.
This digital library hosted at Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan offers over 500 titles cataloged as “Chaghatai” among their collections. Unfortunately there is no real distinction made between manuscripts and print, cataloging is not always helpful, and bandwidth is frustratingly slow at times, but the chaotic nature of this collection means that one often finds things like quotidien notebooks as well, making it feel at times more archive than library. Select the 10th category “Чыгыштын эски басылмаларындагы китептер жана кол жазмалар (чагатай тили)” for Chaghatai.
https://manuscript.bizdin.kg/%D0%BF%D0%BE%D0%B8%D1%81%D0%BA/#results
Darul Kutub
Regional affiliation: Tatar.
Books and periodical numbers: around 1600. Manuscripts: 25.
Although the Kazan-hosted website lacks advanced search capabilities, it does have very complete collections of the texts and periodicals that it houses (for instance an almost complete and beautifully scanned set of the Tatar periodical Shura) so if there’s something you’re looking for, it’s always worth checking here. And the website is blazing-fast.
Kazan Federal University’s Lobachevsky Library
Regional affiliation: Tatar.
Books: hundreds? Manuscripts: 252. Periodicals: probably a lot.
Hosted at the Lobachevsky research library of Kazan Federal University (Научная библиотека им. Н.И. Лобачевского, КФУ), this collection unfortunately seems rather haphazardly organized, necessitating three different links below. I haven’t had any luck sorting things by language, or even running all but the most rudimentary of search functions, but they have some very interesting stuff if you have the patience to browse through it.
Books (mixed languages): https://repo.kpfu.ru/jspui/handle/net/84
Manuscripts: https://repo.kpfu.ru/jspui/handle/net/18503
Periodicals: https://repo.kpfu.ru/jspui/handle/net/12
Mirashanä
Regional affiliation: Tatar.
Books: 477. Manuscripts: 24. Periodicals: 31 titles, few complete.
Hosted in Kazan in Tatarstan, the Mirashanä hosts a collection of Tatar books, manuscripts, and periodicals.
https://miras.info/projects/mirasxane/books
Uzbekistan’s Alisher Navoiy National Library’s Rare Book Collection
Regional affiliation: Uzbek.
Books: 2545. Manuscripts: 122. Periodicals: over 4000.
Unfortunately this collection at Tashkent cannot be compared to the substantial but online-inaccessible manuscript collection of the Al-Beruni Institute of Oriental Studies, but it does have a number of books and rare Uzbek periodicals.
Digital collections outside of Central Asia
Hint for non-Central Asian collections: check for Ottoman as well!
Since not all catalogers were familiar with the differences between Ottoman and Chaghatai, Chaghatai texts are sometimes catalogued as Ottoman (or even just “Turkish”). For example, this manuscript at the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn Ms. Codex 1970) is listed as Ottoman Turkish, but when you open it up you find Chaghatai suffixes like -ga instead of the Ottoman dative -a, so clearly this manuscript was miscataloged. What this means is that there are probably some other Chaghatai texts waiting to be recovered in Ottoman Turkish collections.
Bibliothèque nationale de France
Manuscripts: more than 391.
The National Library of France holds a rich collection of Chaghatai manuscripts, but unfortunately searching by the language tag “djaghataï” is not as fruitful as searching for titles with the words “turc-oriental” (including speech marks). But there clearly must be more Chaghatai books catalogued in some other way.
https://gallica.bnf.fr/accueil/en/html/accueil-en
Fihrist (United Kingdom)
Manuscripts: 9.
A search portal for Islamicate manuscripts in the UK. Unfortunately, only 9 out of the 122 Chaghatai manuscripts are currently accessible online.
Jarring Collection at Lund University
Regional affiliation: Uyghur.
Books: 57. Manuscripts: 448.
This important collection at Lund University contains a number of printed texts produced by Swedish missionaries in Kashgar in the early 20th century which includes Christian texts, but also poetry and letter collections that provide a glimpse of local life. The manuscript collection is extremely rich in 19th and 20th century works.
Prints: https://www.jarringlibrary.lingfil.uu.se/kashgar/
Manuscripts: https://www.alvin-portal.org/alvin/resultList.jsf?dswid=-6260&af=%5B%22alpha3_facet%3Auig%22%5D&p=1&fs=true&searchType=TEXT&sortString=relevance_sort_desc&noOfRows=10&query=&aq=%5B%5B%5D%5D&aqe=%5B%5D (Note: if this link doesn’t work, look for works tagged as “Uighur” under the category of “Books and manuscript” in the main search page of the Alvin-Portal.)
Jarring Collection at Indiana University
Regional affiliation: Uyghur.
Manuscripts: 107
Although the Jarring collection is stored at Lund University, a linguistics project at Indiana University in the United States has also made some of Gunnar Jarring’s Chaghatai manuscripts available on their website – in some cases even with text transliteration and translation!
https://uyghur.linguistics.indiana.edu/manuscripts/index.xhtml
Princeton University Library
Books: 10. Manuscripts: 16.
Princeton University Library has a smaller collection of Chaghatai texts online than one might expect, but they do have a fairly robust Ottoman collection, which could hide some Chaghatai texts among them.
Qalamos (Germany)
Manuscripts: 138.
A search portal for many German libraries (and from several other countries) specialising in manuscripts, Qalamos features some very advanced search functionality. Start by selecting “Manuscripts” from the menu on the top-right, then search away.
https://www.qalamos.net/content/index.xed
Vambery collection, Hungarian Academy of Sciences
Manuscripts: 48 (all the ones marked “Török”)
Vambery was probably the first European scholar who bequeathed to the Turkic language used in Central Asia the name of “Chaghatai”, so his collection – though small – remains quite important. Texts marked as “Eastern Turkish” are Chaghatai, although not all Chaghatai texts have been indicated in this manner.
http://vambery.mtak.hu/index-en.html (Note: for reasons unclear the https version leads to a more updated site that has a less convenient or possibly no access to the books, so use this http version)
Yazmalar
Manuscripts: 98.
Türkiye’s search portal for manuscripts. Contains 98 Chaghatai manuscripts with online access (admittedly, a mere drop compared to their ocean of over 160,000 Ottoman Turkish manuscripts). You have to register for an account, which can be done for free. To view the manuscript, click the green icon with the icon of an image file in the manuscript’s entry.
I highly doubt that this list is exhaustive, so if you know of others that I didn’t mention, please let us know in the comments!
References
Eric Schluessel, An Introduction to Chaghatay: A Graded Textbook for Reading Central Asian Sources (Michigan Publishing, 2018).
Hi Michael,
Thanks for this great article. We at the British Library have published records for the more than 100 Chagatai/Turki manuscripts in our holdings. We digitized about 40 of them but most are still offline because of the cyber attack, although there are two Navoiy works back online now. I’d be happy to share the links for everything with you to update your article.
Best,
Michael Erdman