A CHAGATAI MANUSCRIPT ON TRADITIONAL PROFESSION IN UYGHURS: KİTĀB-I GARÎBÎ UYGURLARDA GELENEKSEL MESLEKLERİ KONU ALAN ÇAĞATAYCA BİR ESER: KİTÂB-I GARÎBÎ

Uyghurs, who had a rich cultural background in fields such as architecture, painting, miniature, music andtraditional professions, had a great influence on the development and spread of Turkish culture. This richcultural heritage, shaped in oral tradition, has started to spread in written form in Chagatai Turkish since the15th century. While the author or copyist of some of these written works, which are about cultural heritageand fed from oral tradition, are unknown, the date and author of some of them are known. Especiallyin the 19th and 20th centuries, most of the poets, who lived in East Turkestan and wrote classical works,wrote works in the genre of mesnevi and tezkire, which deal with the historical and cultural heritage ofthe Uyghurs. One of the names who produced works in this style is Turdi Nâzım Garîbî. The work ofGarîbî, which was written in 1841 and is about traditional professions, was written in Chagatai Turkishand in mesnevi verse and is called Kitāb-ı Garîbî. The work consists of an introduction, 32 chapters and978 couplets. Written upon the request of Zuhûriddin Beg, the ruler of Kashgar at the time, the workincludes information about such widely practiced traditional professions among the Uyghurs as farming,blacksmithing, adobe crafting, jewelry, carpentry, cloth weaving, trader, bakery, boiler making, miskerçilik,furriery, taming (building craftsmanship), rug making, shoemaking, fabric dyeing, dyeing, blacksmithingand weaving, and information about their characteristics. In some parts of the work, there are debates of theprofessionals. The work, which includes information about 32 professions in total, is important in terms ofrevealing the place of traditional professions in the socio-cultural and economic life of the Uyghurs. In thearticle, the formation and development process of traditional professions among the Uyghurs, the works onthe professions, the professions that have survived until today and the traditional professions included inKitāb-ı Garîbî will be introduced and evaluated.Keywords: Uyghurs, Traditional Profession, Chagatai Turkish, Mesnevi, Futuwwatnāme.