Oghuz Khagan

Oghuz Khagan or Oghuz Khan (Oguz Han or Oguz Kagan ; Oğuz Kağan or Oğuz Han; Azerbaijani: Oğuz Xan or Oğuz Xaqan) is a legendary khan of the Turkic people and an eponymous ancestor of Oghuz Turks. Some Turkic cultures use the legend of Oghuz Khan to describe their ethnic and tribal origins. The various versions of the narrative preserved in many different manuscripts has been published in numerous languages as listed below in the references. The narratives about him are often entitled Oghuzname, of which there are several traditions, describing his many feats and conquests, some of these tend to overlap with other Turkic epic traditions such as Seljukname and The Book of Dede Korkut. The name of Oghuz Khan has been associated with Maodun, also known as Mete Han; the reason being that there is a remarkable similarity between the biography of Oghuz Khagan in the Turkic mythology and the biography of Maodun found in the Chinese historiography, which was first noticed by the Russo-Chuvash sinologist Hyacinth. The legend of Oghuz Khan is one of a number of different origin narratives that circulated among the Turkic peoples of Central Asia. It was first recorded in the 13th century. The anonymous Uyghur vertical script narrative of the 14th century, which is preserved in Paris, is a manuscript that was probably already being modified to fit with stories of the Mongol Conquest, as Paul Pelliot has shown and it does have suggestions of Oghuz Khan's later significance as Islamizer of the Turks, and does not include the figure of Moghul (Mongol) as an ancestor of Oghuz Khan. Abū’l-Ghāzī's 17th-century version called Shajara-i Tarākima (Genealogy of the Turkmen) roughly follows Rashīd ad-Dīn's already Mongolized (post-conquest) version of the early 14th century. But in his account, Oghuz Khan is more fully integrated into Islamic and Mongol traditional history. The account begins with the descent from Adam to Noah, who after the flood sends his three sons to repopulate the earth: Ham was sent to Africa, Sam to Iran, and Yafes went to the banks of the Itil and Yaik rivers and had eight sons named Turk, Khazar, Saqlab, Rus, Ming, Chin, Kemeri, and Tarikh.