Kara-Khanid Khanate - Culture

Culture

The takeover by the Karakhanids did not changed essentially the Iranian character of Central Asia, but it set into motion a demographic and ethnolinguistic shift. During the Karakhanid era, the local population became increasingly Turkic in speech - initially the shift was linguistic with the local people adopting Turkic speech, then the poorer Turks also began to settle. While over the centuries Central Asia became Turkicized, culturally the Turks came close to being Persianized or, in certain respects, Arabicized. The Karakhanids became Persianized to the extent of adopting the "Afrasiab", a Shahnameh mythical figure as the ancestor of their lineage. Nevertheless, the official or court language used in Kashgar and other Karakhanid centers, referred to as "Khaqani" (royal), remained Turkic. The language was partly based on dialects spoken by the Turkic tribes that made up the Karakhanids and possessed qualities of linear descend from the Kök and Uyghur Turkic. The Turkic script was also used for all documents and correspondence of the khaqans according to Dīwānu l-Luġat al-Turk.

The Dīwānu l-Luġat al-Turk (Dictionary of Languages of the Turks) was written by a prominent Karakhanid historian Mahmud al-Kashgari who may have lived for some time in Kashgar at the Karakhanid court. He wrote this first comprehensive dictionary of Turkic languages in Arabic for the Caliphs of Baghdad in 1072-76. Another famous Karakhanid writer was Yusuf Balasaghuni who wrote Kutadgu Bilig (The Wisdom of Felicity), an important but the only known literary work written in Turkic from the Karakhanid period. Kutadgu Bilig is a form of advice literature known as mirrors for princes. The Turkic identity is evident in both of these pieces of work but they also showed the influences of Persian and Islamic culture.

Islam and its civilization flourished under the Karakhanids. One earliest example of madrasas in Central Asia was founded in Samarkand by Ibrahim Tamghach Khan. Ibrahim also founded a hospital to care for sick as well as providing shelter for the poor. His son Nasr Shams al-Mulk built ribats for the caravanserais on the route between Bukhara and Samarkand, and a palace near Bukhara. Some of the buildings constructed by the Karakhanids still survive today - for example the Kalyan minaret built by Mohammad Aslan Khan beside the main mosque in Bukhara, and three mausolea in Uzgend. The early Karakhanid rulers, as nomads, lived not in the city but in an army encampment outside the capital, and while by the time of Ibrahim the Karakhanids still maintained a nomadic tradition, their extensive religious and civil constructions showed that the culture and traditions of the settled population of Transoxiana had become assimilated.