On the Missing Couplets of Çarh-Name

Abstract

Çarh-name, which is claimed by Fuad Köprülü to be the first Turkish text written in Anatolia, is a verse by Ahmed Fakih. Although Köprülü states that Ahmed Fakih lived in the 13th century, recent research has pointed out that there was another poet with the same name who was alive in the mid-14th century. Despite the evaluations regarding the age of the poet, there is no uncertainty about the attribution of the Çarh-name to the name of Ahmed Fakih. The seventeen couplets after the eighty-third couplet of the verse are missing from Eğridirli Hacı Kemal’s Cami‘üʼn-nezaʼir, the only copy of Çarh-name. Some time ago, it was found out that the pages, which were thought to have been added sequentially/unsequentially to a collection of poetry (mecmua) registered under the name Mecmua Feraid, belonged to the Bayezid copy BD (No: 5782), which is the most voluminous copy of Eğridirli Hacı Kemal’s Camiʻüʼn-nezaʼir, which also contains the text of Çarh-name. Throughout the study, the Bayezid copy and the parts detected in the collection of poetry (mecmua) are discussed in terms of Çarh-name, and at the end of the study, the full text of Çarh-name, which is an important text in terms of the history of Turkish language and literature, is presented with the addition of missing couplets.

Ethical committee approval is not required for this research.

The author declares no conflicts of interest in this study.

This research received no external funding.