Religious Expressions in the Old Turkish Texts Belonging to the Christian Milieu

Creative Commons License

KESKİN B.

BILIG, sa.107, ss.63-100, 2023 (SSCI) identifier

  • Yayın Türü: Makale / Tam Makale
  • Basım Tarihi: 2023
  • Doi Numarası: 10.12995/bilig.10703
  • Dergi Adı: BILIG
  • Derginin Tarandığı İndeksler: Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), Scopus, International Bibliography of Social Sciences, Index Islamicus, Linguistic Bibliography, Linguistics & Language Behavior Abstracts, MLA - Modern Language Association Database, Political Science Complete, Sociological abstracts, Worldwide Political Science Abstracts, TR DİZİN (ULAKBİM)
  • Sayfa Sayıları: ss.63-100
  • İstanbul Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet

Özet

The first written examples of the Turkish language belong to the Old Turkish period, which started with the Orkhon Turkish in the eighth century before developing further with the Old Uy-ghur. In this second phase of the period, more works were pre-sented than in the first phase, and these had a greater diversity of subjects. In this respect, a majority of these texts inherited from the Old Uyghur have a religious character. Although most of the works are related to Buddhism, there is a small number of works or fragments on Manichaeism and Christianity. The main aim of this study is to identify the religious expressions related to Chris-tianity in Old Uyghur. In the first part of this study, I outline the Nestorian sect, which was accepted by the Christian Turkish com-munities, and its spread among the Old Uyghurs. Then, I explain the content of the texts belonging to the Christian milieu. In addition to explaining the religious expressions in the texts with examples, I question their existence in Buddhist, Manichaean, and other Old Turkish texts. Besides, I intend to compare them with other works written after the acceptance of Islam.