The Origin of the Aytis: A Historical-Typological Path From World Folklore Through the Turkic Peoples to the Karakalpak Tradition

The article examines the origin of the aytıs genre (a poetic contest between twoperformers) in a consistent sequence, from the verbal-contest traditions of world folklore, throughthe Turkic peoples, to Karakalpak aytıs. First, examples of verbal contests from Mesopotamian,ancient Greek and Italian traditions are presented as a typological background. Then the earliestTurkic written debate poem (Mahmud al-Kashgari), the ozan tradition and the ashıq atıshma ofAnatolia, and Azerbaijani and Kazakh-Kyrgyz aytıs are compared. On Central Asian material, thetransition of badik, zhar-zhar and qaym-aytıs from ritual roots to verbal contest is traced. In theKarakalpak part, ritual songs collected by Q. Ayımbetov (bádik-gúlapsan, porxan zikiri, yaramazan,xawjar, bet ashar), sheshenlik (the art of the orator), juwap (the girl-boy reply contest), contestelements in epics and the aytıs of poets are analysed in the Turkic context. As a result, a stagedmodel of the formation of aytıs is proposed as a scientific hypothesis, and its confirmed andunconfirmed parts are separated.