THE ORIGIN OF THE AYTIS: A HISTORICAL-TYPOLOGICAL PATH FROM WORLD FOLKLORE THROUGH THE TURKIC PEOPLES TO THE KARAKALPAK TRADITION
Keywords:
aytıs, verbal contest, munazara (debate poem), ozan, ashıqAbstract
The article examines the origin of the aytıs genre (a poetic contest between two
performers) in a consistent sequence, from the verbal-contest traditions of world folklore, through
the Turkic peoples, to Karakalpak aytıs. First, examples of verbal contests from Mesopotamian,
ancient Greek and Italian traditions are presented as a typological background. Then the earliest
Turkic written debate poem (Mahmud al-Kashgari), the ozan tradition and the ashıq atıshma of
Anatolia, and Azerbaijani and Kazakh-Kyrgyz aytıs are compared. On Central Asian material, the
transition of badik, zhar-zhar and qaym-aytıs from ritual roots to verbal contest is traced. In the
Karakalpak part, ritual songs collected by Q. Ayımbetov (bádik-gúlapsan, porxan zikiri, yaramazan,
xawjar, bet ashar), sheshenlik (the art of the orator), juwap (the girl-boy reply contest), contest
elements in epics and the aytıs of poets are analysed in the Turkic context. As a result, a staged
model of the formation of aytıs is proposed as a scientific hypothesis, and its confirmed and
unconfirmed parts are separated.
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