Yusuf ve Züleyha - يوسف و زليحا.

This material is held atBritish Library Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections

  • Reference
    • GB 59 Or 2172
  • Dates of Creation
    • 16th century
  • Name of Creator
  • Language of Material
    • Turkish
  • Physical Description
    • 1 text 189 ff Material : Paper. Foliation : European, 189 ff. Dimensions : 178 mm x 114 mm. Ruling : Gold-ruled margins; 17 lines. Script : Nestalik.

Scope and Content

This volume contains the story of Yusuf and Züleyha, as recounted by Jāmī and paraphrased in verse by Hamdi. Hamdullah, whose mahlas was Hamdi, was the youngest son of the celebrated Şeyh Ak Şemseddin. He lived under Bayezit II and died in 909 AH (1503-04 CE). His Yusuf ve Züleyha, among the most popular of the corpus of Ottoman Turkish mesneviler, was first dedicated to Bayezit, but the poet, seeing that it did not meet with the expected acknowledgment, subsequently suppressed the dedication. Besides the present poem, he left, according to Kınalızade and to the Şakaik, a Leyla Mecnun, a Mevlid poem entitled Mevlid-i cismani ve mevrid-i cani (or mevlid-i ruhani), and a Kiyafetname. The date of composition of this work, 897 AH (1491-92 CE), which is not found in the present copy, is conveyed in two verses at the end of Add MS 19364. The manuscript is wanting a few single leaves, probably abstracted for the sake of illustrations. The text contains a single unvan. This manuscript was likely copied in the 16th century by Derviş Gidayi min fukara-yı Şeyh Ahmet İbn-i Gülşeni.

Access Information

Not Public Record(s)

Unrestricted

Acquisition Information

Acquired by the British Museum from Joseph Gabriel Hava (?).

Other Finding Aids

See Rieu, Catalogue of the Turkish Manuscripts in the British Museum, pp. 169-70.

Related Material

Other copies of this text can be found at Or 1171, Or 7111, Or 7112, Or 14198 (illustrated), Or 14887 (illustrated), and Add MS 19364. For more information on the author and the text, see Gibb, HOP II, pp. 140-225; İA V, pp. 183-6; Kınalızade, Tezkiretü'ş-şuara, Or 37, f 88r; Latifi, f 45; Şakaik, f 33; Hammer, Geschichte der Osmanlichen Dichtkunst I, p. 151 (where the contents of the present poem are provided in full); and Öztürk, Zehra, 'Hamdullah Hamdi: Mesnevileriyle tanınan mutasavvıf şair,' Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslâm Ansiklopedisi. Last accessed : 14 September 2021. https://islamansiklopedisi.org.tr/hamdullah-hamdi. For the Persian version of the story, see Rieu, Catalogue of the Persian Manuscripts in the British Museum, p. 645.