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Notes on Some Turkish Personal Names in Seljūq Military History 99
was then sold in the slave market of Nakhshab in Samanid Transoxania, is exceptional.
3
As has been stressed in the previous two onomastic studies mentioned
above, it has seemed to the present author important that the Turkish names, so
recurrent in the history of the central and eastern Islamic lands from the fifth/
eleventh century onwards, should be examined from the philological aspect and
their correct forms, very often mangled by Arabic and Persian authors and copyists
who knew no Turkish and, less excusably, by the modern scholars citing
them, should be elucidated as far as possible. This need was recognised by Albert
von Le Coq over eighty years ago („Viele der türkischen Namen sind von
den europäischen Übersetzern und Historikern falsch vokalisiert worden“, as he
wrote in his „Türkische Namen und Titel in Indien“, in Aus Indiens Kultur. Festgabe
R. von Garbe … zu seinem 70. Geburtstag dargebracht von seinen Freunden,
Verehrern und Schülern, Erlangen 1927, 1); and two or more decades later, in 1950,
Jean Sauvaget did pioneering work on the Turkish onomastic of the Mamluks,
a work which does not however seem to have been followed up by the comparatively
numerous group of workers in what is now the flourishing field of
Mamluk history and literature, those whom one might term Mamlukologists.
Sauvaget noted there that „Les noms propres turcs qui foisonnent dans les chroniques
arabes du Moyen-Âge n’ont point été traité par les arabisants d’une manière
rationelle“ („Noms et surnoms de Mamelouks“, 31), and the task of elucidating
these names is in fact more one for the Turcologist than the Arabist. It is true
that, until a half-century or so ago, the Hilfsmittel for the study of Turkish onomastic
had not advanced greatly beyond the nineteenth-century works of Pavet de
Courteille, Sir James Redhouse, and W. Radloff and other Russian scholars
working in Siberia and Turkestan, despite the publication in 1917 by Kilisli Rif^at
Bey of Ma1mud al-Kashghar\’s infinitely valuable Diwan lughat al-turk. This last
Turkish-Arabic dictionary has since then formed a major basis for our vastly improved
knowledge of the earlier stages of the Turkic languages, fully utilised
in what are now the fundamental reference works of László Rásonyi, Gerhard
Doerfer and Sir Gerard Clauson (for a general survey of the development
of Turkish lexicography and resultant knowledge of Turkish onomastic over
the last 150 years or so, see János Eckmann, EI, art. „ Kamus. 3. Turkish lexicography“).
3 See C.E. Bosworth, The Ghaznavids, their Empire in Afghanistan and Eastern Iran 994:1040,
Edinburgh 1963, 39–40. The Ghaznavids’ court panegyrists occasionally mention in their poetry
the tribes from which the sultans’ ghulam troops came (ibid., 109), but without information on
the origins of specific commanders or soldiers.