Turcology Research

Abstract

The Saatnâme/Ruzname texts, which passed to the Turkish written culture environment from the Arab-Persian cultures and were written under the names such as Ruzname, Havass-ı Eyyâm, Ahkâm-ı Eyyâm, Eyyâm-ı Sa’d, Eyyâm-ı Nahîsât, Eyyâm-ı Sa’d u Nahs, are a type of fortune-telling in the form of literary texts that deal with the days of each month with a lucky-unlucky approach. In this article, a prose Ruzname example titled “Hazâ Kitâb-ı Sultan Mahmûd” was examined by transferring it to the new Turkish letters. The treatise manuscript is registered in the Turkish Manuscripts Collection of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Library, numbered LSC.0896, archive number 1687. The text lists the lucky-unlucky days of each month and informs the addresses about what to do and what not to do on those days. The subjects related to the fortunes of children born on the days of the month, dreams seen on lucky-unlucky days, diseases caught, and the fate of lost objects or people are prominent examples in the text. The text in question is a new version written in the form of an independent prose treatise. As one of the thousands of Turkish texts preserved in various libraries, the text in question, which contains important information about Turkish folk culture, includes definitions and provisions of good luck and bad luck set forth with Islamic references regarding days. After focusing on the origin of this phenomenon and its equivalents in Turkish culture in our article, examples from a text that exemplifies the transition of the lucky-unlucky approach regarding days to Turkish culture after Islam are classified and shown in tables and explained. The lucky-unlucky days in each month and historical events accepted to have occurred in these days, the days considered bad luck in each of the 12 months, provisions regarding which actions should or should not be done on which days of the month, the fortunes of children to be born, dreams, illnesses, lost objects and persons and various provisions not included in this classification are evaluated in the context of the belief in good luck and bad luck days. Although it is seen that the animal representing each year in the old calendar of the Turks was effective in the lucky-unlucky beliefs related to that year, it can be thought that such beliefs about days passed from the Arab-Persian cultural environments to the Turkish written culture and then became widespread in the oral culture environment.