The Genealogy of the Copies of “A Brief History of the Crimean Khans”

The paper presents the results of the study of the genealogy of the copies of a small work on the history of the Crimean Khanate, known under the conventional title “A Brief History of the Crimean Khans”. Based on a comparative study of the Kyiv and Berlin manuscripts, the important data on the history of the text of the work were obtained. In particular, the probable time of its creation (1730–1736) and the time when it was copied into the Berlin copy of the Abu-l-Ghazi’s work (around 1737) were determined. It has been proven that the “Brief History” is a separate work, and not a continuation of the “Turkic Genealogy” of Abu-l-Ghazi, to which it was added in the Kyiv manuscript. It was found that the Berlin manuscript was the first of the manuscripts of North Caucasian origin into which the “Brief History” was copied. It was established that the main events in the history of the protographs of the currently known “Shejere-i Turki” copies, which contain the “Brief History”, with the exception of its copying into the Berlin manuscript in St. Petersburg, had taken place in the North Caucasus. This fact, in combination with the presence of Nogai-themed texts in the Berlin and Kyiv handwritten miscellanies, enabled us to put forward a hypothesis of their circulation among the Nogais in the North Caucasus. This is also evidenced by the marginalia which concern the Nogai people’s history in the text of the “Shejere-i Turki” in the Kyiv manuscript. The study results show the perspectives of a comparative study of the currently known copies of the “Shejere-i Turki”, containing “A Brief History of the Crimean Khans”, in order to identify the ways of their appearance and dissemination in the North Caucasus.