156 POETS & MYSTICS OF fL-KHANf PERIOD [bkich.iii

His best-known work is a mathnawi poem, entitled Rabdb-
ndma (the " Book of the Rebeck "), which, though mostly
written in Persian, contains 156 verses in Turkish, which Gibb
describes as " the earliest important specimen of West-
Turkish poetry that we possess." These archaic verses
have attracted the attention of Von Hammer, Wickerhauser,
Bernhauer, Fleischer, Salemann^ and Radloff, and Gibb
has very fully discussed them and their author in the first
volume of his great History of Ottoman Poetry, pp. 149-163.
"To Sultan Veled," he says (loc. cit., pp. 156-7), "belongs
not only the honour due to the pioneer in every good work,
but the credit which is justly his who successfully accom¬
plishes an arduous enterprise. To have inaugurated the
poetry of a nation is an achievement of which any man
might be proud." Thus even so great an admirer of
Turkish poetry as Gibb is constrained to admit that it
chiefly owes its inception to a Persian, and is in fact, in a
sense, a branch of Persian poetry, to which for five centuries
and a half (A.D. 1300-18 50) it owed its inspiration. At all
events the rise of both the Ottoman State and Turkish
literature belong to the period which we have discussed in
this and the preceding chapters, and henceforth it will be
necessary to allude to both with increasing frequency.

1 For references see Gibb's Hist, of Ottoman Poetry, vol. i, p. 157
ad calc. Radloff's article, which he does not mention, is entitled Uber
Alt-Tiirkische Dialekte. i. Die Seldschukischen Verse im Rebdbndmeh.
It was published in 1890 in vol. x, Livraison i, of the Melaftges
Asiatiques at St Petersburg.