Kurdistan in the First Encyclopedia (1896): 'A Large Country'

Kurdistan in the First Encyclopedia (1896): "A Large Country"

At a Glance

The first Turkish-language encyclopedia in history, the Kamûs'ul-A'lâm, was published in Istanbul in six volumes between 1889 and 1898. Its author was Şemseddin Sami.
The encyclopedia's name means "Encyclopedia of Proper Names." Its six volumes run to 4,830 pages, and they came from the pen of one man.
The "Kurdistan" entry is in the fifth volume, dated 1896; it fills seven columns across pages 3840 to 3843. The entry defines Kurdistan as "a large country."
The entry describes the Kurds' country border by border, discusses its population, and sums up its language, its livelihood, and its history. It reaches back to Xenophon's Karduchoi.
The name Kurdistan appears in dozens of other entries too: Bitlis is "a city in Kurdistan," Kirkuk "a city in the Mosul province of Kurdistan."
This book, printed with state approval, has no entry titled "Turkey," because at that date no country or region bore the name.
M. Emin Bozarslan translated the entries from Ottoman into modern Turkish. The survey took more than three years and came out as a book from Deng Yayınları in 2001.
Bozarslan had published the first translation in 1996, on the entry's hundredth anniversary. The same man is the one who brought the Sharafnama into Turkish.
The book's lasting worth is this: the name of a people and its country is on record on the most official shelf of the nineteenth century's knowledge.

Istanbul, Babıâli Avenue, 1896. At the press at number seven, the machines are turning. The owner is an Armenian publisher, Mihran Efendi. The work in hand is the fifth volume of a giant project that has run for nine years. That day the typesetter is binding page 3840. The entry at the top of it opens like this: "Kurdistan: in Western Asia, a large country."

The book is not banned. Quite the opposite. At the head of each volume it is written that the Ministry of Education had the work printed "with appreciation and commendation." The state approved it. The year is 1896; in Athens that spring, the first modern Olympic Games had just closed.

A hundred years pass. Now we are at a desk in Sweden. An exiled writer is carrying the same page from Arabic letters over into Latin ones. His name is M. Emin Bozarslan. Between the two men stand a change of alphabet and a long era of denial. Bozarslan's aim is simple: let everyone read again what is written on that page.

This article is the story of that page, and of that labor.

Six Volumes in Nine Years: The Kamûs'ul-A'lâm

The Kamûs'ul-A'lâm is the first Turkish-language encyclopedia in history. Its first volume appeared in Istanbul in 1889, its sixth and last in 1898. The name is Arabic: kamûs means a great dictionary, a'lâm means proper names. Bozarslan renders the title "Encyclopedia of Proper Names."

Its scale unsettles even today. Six volumes, 4,830 pages in all, two columns to a page. Bozarslan adds a calculation: because Arabic letters take up less room, the work would run to about twelve volumes and 9,660 pages if it were set in Latin letters. And what is inside it? Every important person from prophets to painters; every country from Norway to Chile; cities, mountains, rivers, seas.

And one man wrote all of it. No committee, no secretariat, not even a typewriter. Bozarslan answers this labor with a single word: genius. So who was this man?

Who Was Şemseddin Sami?

Şemseddin Sami was born in 1850 in Fraşer, a village of Yanya, in what is today Albania. He was an Ottoman intellectual of Albanian origin. He studied at the Greek lyceum in Yanya. Besides his native Albanian, he knew Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, Persian, French, Italian, and Greek. In 1871 he settled in Istanbul; in 1880 the palace appointed him secretary of the Military Inspection Commission.

His pen did not stop. He wrote French-Turkish and Turkish-French dictionaries. In 1886 he published a grammar of his own mother tongue, the "Albanian Grammar." The work counted as the first Turkish novel, "Taaşşuk-ı Tal'at ve Fıtnat," bears his name. He also prepared the famous Turkish dictionary "Kamûs-ı Türki." The author of more than twenty books, he died in Istanbul in 1904.

Look at this picture: an Albanian writer, schooled at a Greek lyceum, writes the dictionary of Turkish and makes Kurdistan an entry in a Turkish encyclopedia. That picture is the many-peopled reality of the nineteenth-century Ottoman world. It is also the main idea of Bozarslan's introduction: in that world the names of peoples existed, and were written freely.

"A Large Country": What Does the Kurdistan Entry Say?

Now the entry itself. The "Kurdistan" entry is in the fifth volume, which appeared in 1896. It begins on page 3840 and ends on 3843: seven columns. For an encyclopedia, that is a considerable amount of room.

The entry opens with this definition: Kurdistan is a large country in Western Asia, most of it under Ottoman rule and a part of it belonging to Iran, and it takes its name from the Kurdish people who form the majority of its population. Sami adds an honest note: this name is geographic, not administrative; because the Kurds live scattered and mixed with other peoples, it is hard to draw a precise border. Even so he draws one: a country stretching from the lakes of Urmia and Van to the rivers Kerxe and Diyala, shaped like a triangle, "or rather like a pear." Its length is about 900 kilometers. Its neighbors: Azerbaijan, Persian Iraq, Loristan with Arab Iraq, Cezire (the Jazira, the land between the two great rivers), and Anatoli, that is Anatolia.

The entry discusses population too. It gives the total number of Kurds as near two and a half million, of whom one and a half million are in Ottoman territory. Sami also writes that the Kurds are not confined to Kurdistan: there are Kurds in the regions of Aleppo and Damascus, all over Anatolia, in the Caucasus, in Khorasan, even in Afghanistan. Those Kurds are, today, one of the largest stateless peoples in the Middle East, between 30 and 45 million.

Then comes the country itself. Mountains, pastures, rivers racing to the Tigris. The products: wheat, barley, tobacco, cotton, rice. It even records a manna, gathered from the leaves of the dwarf oak and used in place of sugar. It notes petroleum in the south; the year is 1896, a quarter century before the oil of Kirkuk became a world matter. Transport looks to one vehicle only: the keleks, the rafts that float on the Tigris.

The history section is more striking still. Sami names Xenophon: the Greek commander had met, in these mountains in 401 BC, a people called "Kardux." For Sami, Kardux is the Greek mouth's form of the name "Kurd"; so these lands were peopled by Kurds 2,300 years ago. From there the entry runs to the age of the Medes and Assyria, to the Islamic period, to Selahaddin Eyyubi (Saladin), and to 1514: the Kurdish princes, through the mediation of İdris-i Bitlisi, sided with the Ottomans of their own will.

On language the entry is two-faced. On one side it writes that Kurdish resembles Persian and, still more, the older Pehlevi tongue; it grants the existence of Kurdish poems and literary books. On the other side it calls the language "hard and coarse." And it makes a striking admission: Europeans have already published a grammar and a dictionary of Kurdish; but in "our Islamic languages" nothing whatever has yet been written on this language. That one sentence explains why Kurdology was born first in Rome and Petersburg; we told that story in a separate article.

Where Is the Entry Solid, and Where Has It Aged?

How should one read a hundred-and-twenty-year-old encyclopedia entry today? With two eyes: with respect, and with criticism.

Its solid side is clear. The description of the geography, the lists of cities, the products, the tribal order, the distribution of religious communities: these are the most orderly Turkish summary of the period. Sami speaks with measure; where he does not know, he says "we can say approximately." His is a mind inclined to source discipline.

It has aged in places too. The entry counts the origin of the Medes as unknown and writes that they were thought to be "Turanlı," of Turkic stock. That was a claim in circulation in that age; the research of today places the Medes among the Iranic-speaking peoples, the Iranian branch of the Indo-European family. Sami also ties the Kurds not to the Medes but to a migration from the east, and that scheme of origins is disputed now as well. In a note to his translation, Bozarslan points out that this "supposition" conflicts with the widespread Median conviction among the Kurds, and recalls the 1919 article series of the Kurdish writer Xelîl Xeyalî on the subject. The Kardux-Kurd identity stands in a similar place: taken as certain in Sami's day, opened to debate by later linguistics. Scholars are divided here still.

And there is a residue of prejudice. The label "hard and coarse" is not knowledge but the habit of an ear. It is telling, too, that the poets who wrote in Kurdish, Ehmedê Xanî, Melayê Cizîrî, Feqiyê Teyran, have no entry in the encyclopedia. Kurdish scholars who wrote in Arabic and Persian find a place in the book; those who wrote in their own tongue do not. Bozarslan notes this gap plainly: those poets were not known in Ottoman cultural circles. The encyclopedia is bounded by the field of vision of its era; what it does not see is not the same as what does not exist.

The Map Is Not Just One Entry

The witness of the Kamûs'ul-A'lâm does not end with one entry. Bozarslan surveyed all six volumes and showed that the name Kurdistan is worked into the encyclopedia's very weave.

Take the examples. The "Anatoli" entry writes that the region is bounded on the southeast by "Kurdistan, Cezire, and Syria." The "Irak" entry begins the region above Baghdad; so in the entry, Iraq is the southern neighbor of Kurdistan. The "Bitlis" entry presents the city as "a city in Kurdistan"; the "Kerkük" entry says "a city in the Mosul province of Kurdistan." The "Asya-yı Osmani" entry divides Ottoman Asia into five parts: Anatoli, Syria, Cezire, Irak, and Kurdistan. In the entries for the Tigris, Van, the Botan river, and Ararat, the same name keeps appearing.

On population there is an interesting document as well. According to the table in the "Memalik-i Osmaniye" entry, the empire holds about eleven and a half million Arabs, ten million Turks, and one and a half million Kurds. Bozarslan argues that this figure is the official record; that with the uncounted in a mountainous country, the real number could be much higher, perhaps double. With the same care he shows that two numbers in the entry are printing errors: the figure set as 7,500 for the Kurds of Iran should in fact be 750,000. Good editing relays the source and tests it, both.

And the famous gap: in this enormous encyclopedia there is no "Türkiye," no "Turkey," entry. There is a "Türkler," a "Turks," entry, as a people; but as the name of a country or a region, Turkey is not yet to be found in the knowledge-world of 1898. On this point Bozarslan's introduction builds a sharp political argument and makes a bitter comparison with the prohibitions of the twentieth century: a name that was free a hundred years earlier was forbidden a hundred years later. We take the documentary core of it: the map of names, in 1898, looked like this. The reader weighs the rest on his own scale.

The Translation That Came a Hundred Years Later: Bozarslan's Labor

Why did these entries have to be translated anew? Because the change of alphabet in 1928 raised a wall between the new generations and this source. For a reader who could not read Turkish in Arabic script, the Kamûs'ul-A'lâm was a closed chest.

The man who opened the chest was M. Emin Bozarslan, a veteran of Kurdish publishing. He was no stranger to such work: he had brought Ehmedê Xanî's Mem û Zîn to Turkish in 1968 and translated the Sharafnama in 1971; the story of that translation is in our Sharafnama article. In exile, between 1985 and 1988, he had republished JÎN, the Kurdish journal of Istanbul in 1918 and 1919, in five volumes.

The Kamûs'ul-A'lâm work went like this. On the hundredth anniversary of the Kurdistan entry, in November 1996, Bozarslan published its translation in two parts in the Istanbul weekly Hêvî. Then he made the work larger: he surveyed all six volumes and translated every entry that touched Kurdistan and the Kurds. This labor of more than three years was first serialized in the pages of a newspaper; in March 2001 it came out as a book from Deng Yayınları, under the title "Tarihteki İlk Türkçe Ansiklopedide Kürdistan ve Kürdler."

The translation's principles are worth noting too. Bozarslan keeps the place names as the encyclopedia gives them: Diyarbekir, Wan, Melazıkürd, Xerput. He adds the common-calendar equivalents beside the hijri dates. He puts hundreds of explanatory notes at the end of the book. He also writes the people's name deliberately as "Kürd," with a "d," and explains his reason in a separate section: the root of the name, in every language, is written with the "d." You may agree or not; but the reason for the choice is clear, and it rests on evidence.

Why Does It Matter That a Name Is on Record?

Return to the opening question. Why is so much made of a single encyclopedia entry?

Because an encyclopedia is like the land registry of the knowledge-world. A name that enters it has entered the common knowledge of its age. The Kamûs'ul-A'lâm was not Kurdish propaganda; it was a reference book printed in Istanbul, with state approval, for everyone. Kurdistan stands there in the seven columns set aside for it. The coldness of alphabetical order turns here into the force of testimony: the entry does not try to persuade anyone; it only records.

Look at the turn of history. The encyclopedia's last volume came out in 1898. That same year, the first Kurdish newspaper began publishing in Cairo; its name too was Kurdistan. We told that newspaper's story as "a declaration of existence." Set the two side by side and the photograph of the century's turn comes into focus. A voice from within brings out its own newspaper in exile; a recorder from outside writes the same name into the capital's encyclopedia. One is a declaration, the other a document. A people's name, at the same moment, is both in its own voice and on the knowledge shelf of its era.

Bozarslan's book reopened that shelf for us. The letters of the press on Babıâli have long since been scattered; the page remains. A good record outlives the press.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Kamûs'ul-A'lâm? It is the encyclopedia of proper names written by Şemseddin Sami and published in Istanbul in six volumes between 1889 and 1898. It is counted the first Turkish-language encyclopedia in history, and holds 4,830 pages of information about persons, countries, cities, and geographic names.

Is there a Kurdistan entry in the encyclopedia? Yes. The "Kurdistan" entry is in the fifth volume of 1896, on pages 3840 to 3843, and defines Kurdistan as "a large country." The name Kurdistan appears in dozens of entries as well, such as Bitlis, Kirkuk, Van, and the Tigris; there is also a short "Kürd" entry.

Who was Şemseddin Sami? He was an Ottoman writer and lexicographer of Albanian origin, born in 1850 in Fraşer. He was the author of the "Kamûs-ı Türki" and of the first Turkish novel. He died in Istanbul in 1904.

Who brought these entries into Turkish? M. Emin Bozarslan. He translated and published the Kurdistan entry on its hundredth anniversary, in 1996; then he surveyed all six volumes and translated every entry related to the Kurds. The work came out as a book from Deng Yayınları in 2001. Bozarslan is also the translator of the Sharafnama and of Mem û Zîn.

Why is there no "Turkey" entry in the encyclopedia? Because in the years the encyclopedia was written, there was no country or geographic region defined by the name Turkey; the name of the state was the Ottoman State. There is a "Turks" entry in the book, as a people. This observation is one of the points the translator Bozarslan documented in the book.

Sources and Further Reading

Primary sources (from the Bedel Boseli Collection):

Şemseddin Sami, Tarihteki İlk Türkçe Ansiklopedide Kürdistan ve Kürdler, translated from Ottoman by M. Emin Bozarslan (Deng Yayınları, Istanbul, March 2001). All the entry quotations, volume and page numbers, printing years, and translator's notes in this article are from this book.
The "Introduction" section of the same book: the details of the encyclopedia, the life of Şemseddin Sami, and the method of the translation.
The "Explanations and Supplementary Information" section of the same book: the corrections of printing errors, and the notes on the Xenophon and Medes debates.

Social Media Summaries

The following summaries are ready to share; copy and use them.

Istanbul, 1896. The first Turkish encyclopedia, printed with state approval, wrote in its fifth volume: "Kurdistan: a large country in Western Asia." The story of a seven-column entry: bedelboseli.com/en/kurdistan-in-the-first-encyclopedia
In the Kamûs'ul-A'lâm, Bitlis is "a city in Kurdistan," Kirkuk "a city in the Mosul province of Kurdistan." And an entry for "Turkey"? None. In 1896 that name did not yet exist: bedelboseli.com/en/kurdistan-in-the-first-encyclopedia
An Albanian writer composed the first Turkish encyclopedia single-handed, and made Kurdistan an entry in it. The record of Şemseddin Sami: bedelboseli.com/en/kurdistan-in-the-first-encyclopedia
The 1928 alphabet change locked the source in a chest. M. Emin Bozarslan surveyed all six volumes and made the Kurdish entries readable again, a century on: bedelboseli.com/en/kurdistan-in-the-first-encyclopedia
One decade, two records: the newspaper Kurdistan in Cairo and the encyclopedia's last volume in Istanbul, both in 1898. One a declaration from within, the other a document from outside: bedelboseli.com/en/kurdistan-in-the-first-encyclopedia