Central Asian Literature
People speaking Mongolian
Around 3000 BC, most people in Central Asia probably spoke one of three different kinds of languages. Some people spoke Indo-European languages like Tocharian. Other people spoke East Iranian languages like Pashto. And some people, especially in the eastern part of Central Asia, spoke Altaic languages like Turkish or Mongolian (nobody is sure whether Turkish is really related to Mongolian or not). Gradually as time went on, fewer people in Central Asia spoke East Iranian languages, and by the time of the Mongol Empire in the 1200's AD, most people spoke either Turkish, Mongolian, or an Indo-European language like Russian, Ukranian, or Armenian.
People may have started to write some of the Indo-European languages like Scythian down by around 650 BC, long after their neighbors to the south in China and West Asia, but earlier than the Germans in Europe to their west. If they did write, it was only short lines here and there - there aren't any written Scythian stories or poems. By the 1100's AD, people were writing Russian epic poems like the Tale of Igor's Campaign. They also wrote biographies of Russian saints. About 1475 AD, a Russian traveler wrote an account of his visit to India.
Nobody wrote down anything in Turkish until about 700 AD. After that, around 700 AD, Turkish poets began to sing long poems like the Alpamysh, the Book of Dede Korkut and the Manas epic. (Compare these to Beowulf, composed in Europe about the same time). By around 1400 AD, somebody wrote down the Book of Dede Korkut.
Nobody wrote down anything in Mongolian until 1227 AD, the year that Genghis Khan died (and then it was just a short thing). Instead, Mongolian poets sang long poems called üligers, usually about a hero who fights a monster called a manggus. The manggus has many heads, and the hero always wins. For example, poets sang the Epic of King Gesar in the 1400's AD, though nobody wrote it down until the 1700's. About 1240 AD, somebody wrote a poem about Genghis Khan's life called "The Secret History of the Mongols".
