The Kyrgyz adopted a Nogay-Kipchak form of the Turkic/Altaic language families, unwritten until 1923. The great Manas epic cycle (half a million verses; compare the Iliad, which has about fifteen thousand) is a veritable encyclopedia of Kyrgyz, Kazakh, Nogay, Uighur, and Turkic legends and songs recited by generations of bards. A Persian manuscript of 1792 is the earliest transcription of these old stories, which relate how the hero Manas and his kyrk jigit (“forty expert horsemen,” one from each tribe) ranged over the Altai region and present-day Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, interacting with Kipchaks, Oirats (Kalmyks), Uighurs, Afghans, and Chinese. Some events can be related to an inscription of AD 732, and many details are older. Scholars remark that women in the tales “are as heroic and militant as the men.” Manas’s wife, for example, avenges his death, killing his murderers and drinking their blood.
FiG. 24.2. Kyz Saikal, the Kalmyk warrior heroine of the Central Asian Manas epic, image by Teodor Gercen featured on a postage stamp, Kyrgyz Republic, 1995.
But the central “hero girl” of the Manas tales is a Kalmyk aemetzaine named Kyz Saikal. (Aemetzaine was a Kalmyk word for strong woman; Chapter 22. The name Saikal could be related to Karakalpak saukele, pointed headdress.) Saikal becomes the leader of her tribe because her husband, the chieftain, is a drunkard (recalling the situation of Amage, queen of the Roxolani; chapter 22). Saikal fights in battles and horse-wrestles with the best male champions—she nearly unhorses Manas. As they prepare for single combat, Manas is filled with anxiety. “What if she dies if I strike her with force! I would [rather] marry her!” He plunges his spear into her right shoulder, but Saikal throws it off and threatens him with her spear. In the poem, Manas expresses his fear of losing the very woman he would choose as his mate, an emotion that surged after the fact in the case of the Greek hero Achilles (chapter 18).6
An impressive mausoleum in northwestern Kyrgyzstan near the Kazakh border is revered as the grave of Manas. Local legend claims that Kanikey, Manas’s widow, created a false inscription on the tomb to confuse her husband’s enemies. As with the many impressive graves incorrectly assumed to belong to men, the mausoleum is actually that of a mystery woman. Her story has vanished except for the inscription (ca. 1334) on the ornate facade, dedicating the mausoleum “to the most glorious of women, Kenizek-Khatun” (Turkic, “Maiden-Queen”).
World History
