Abstract:

and short after that in military reports, of which authors had been to the Turkmen land. Those studies contain Turkmen proverbs as well. This article deals with proverbs which were recorded in the 19th Century European and Russian traveler narratives and military reports. Those proverbs have not yet been studied. Six European and five Russian narratives were examined in this study, and twenty eight proverbs were detected. After eliminating similar ones, twelve proverbs remain. Seven of them emphasize unfavorable characteristics of the Turkmens by reflecting their predatory nature. Possibility five of them are of outsider origin, as questioned in this essay. Our research showed that the proverbs in question are not known by the Turkmens, nor recorded in basic Turkmen proverb books. After scanning sources of the 19th Century Turkmen history and referring to various researchers, we concluded that those proverbs were loaned from the neighboring peoples with which Turkmens were in struggle then, namely the Persians and Kurds as subjects of the Iran state, Afghans of the Afgan state, and Uzbeks, Tajiks and Karakalpaks who lived within the Hive and Bukhara khanates. Travel routes of the concerning authors, who quoted those proverbs, also inspired that they had learned them most probably from those neighboring peoples. Besides, our study indicated that most of the recorded proverbs were from the Teke Turkmens

Keywords: