Old Uyghur Medical Studies and Fragments of a Medical Text

Abstract

Old Uyghur is based on the translation of literary sources related to various religious circles; however, some texts can be evaluated as nonreligious on subjects such as daily life, astronomy, calendar, fortune telling, grammar, and medicine. Medical texts focus on various diseases, pains, treatments, and prescriptions. Considering the historical development of Turkish, it is known that there are texts on medicine from many periods, from East Turkestan to Anatolia. Although a considerable amount of work has survived, especially in the Islamic Central Asian literary language and in Anatolian Turkish, the texts on health in Old Uyghur offer an attractive appearance in terms of the traditions on which they are based, the diseases and pains they are subject to, the treatment practices and the alphabets in which they are written. This paper aims to edit unpublished fragments related to a medical text. In addition, the studies on Old Uyghur medical texts are as old as those prepared in this field. For this reason, the research history of the studies related to the Old Uyghur medicine field since 1930, when the first study was prepared, will shed light on the current situation and lay the groundwork for further research. In this paper, firstly, an evaluation of the studies prepared in the field of Old Uyghur medicine will be presented, and then the Old Uyghur fragments will be published, which also refer to the legendary hero called Shennong in Chinese medicine.