Karakalpak Dutars

KARAKALPAK DUTAR  - The dutar (Dotar) is the main plucked instrument all over Central Asia. It can be found in many different shapes and styles. Although some players play solos on the dutar, it is mainly used to accompany songs and poetry. In the past, Karakalpak bards (performing poets) roamed from village to village, reciting stories and verses. They were accompanied on the bow played two-stringed dutar, and the qobyz and ghypzhek.

The body of the dutar is made from a single block of (usually mulberry) wood. The flat front is made of thin mulberry wood. The edge of the body around the front is left a bit thicker. The sound-holes are a few drilled holes in a geometrical design.

The long thin neck (made of mulberry or apricot) includes the (straight) peg-box. There is no fret-board. The frets are made of nylon strings and tied-on in half diatonic scale (depends on the player). At the right side of the neck is a groove to ease making the knots in the frets. There are two flat T-shaped friction pegs, one on the front, one on the left. The two metal strings run over a small loose bridge to a bit of wood at the end of the body.

The neck and the body is often highly decorated with inlay bone, with black etchings of lines and circles, and glued and nailed to the instrument. The top of the body also has inlays, together forming a kind of circle. The entire instrument is left unvarnished.

Left hand playing is with two fingers for the first string and the thumb for the second string. The right hand plays normally strumming with the index finger.

Source: http://www.atlasofpluckedinstruments.com/central_asia.htm

Good reference on the musical culture of Karakalpakstan read Baksi and Jyrau, Duutar and Kobyz by Djumaev Alexander (Journal of the Academy of Arts of Uzbekistan) for article go to http://sanat.orexca.com/2003/2003-2/baksi_jyrau-2/

The Karakalpak rug collection of the Museum of Oriental Art in Moscow

The Karakalpak rug collection of the Museum of Oriental Art in Moscow contains 52 pieces, of which 51 pieces had been collected by I.V. Savitsky in the 1950s and were presented to the museum in 1958. Almost all of them have analogues in the collection of two Nukus museums: State Museum of Karakalpak Arts and Museum of Local Lore.

A Karakalpak rug, probably 19th ct. Size 160x117 cm
 
The collection includes rugs from Kegeily, Chimbai, and Karauzyak and other districts of Karakalpakstan. For some time, Karakalpaks used not only their own rugs for domestic purposes but those made by Turkmens and Kazakhs as well. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the yurt played an important role in the everyday life of Karakalpaks and was used for main or supplementary lodging. In the yurt interior, diverse rug items of pile, flat-weave, and mixed technique were used: bags and sacks, decorative rugs and carpets, tent bands, and others.

Karshins and eshik kases comprise the major part of the collection. These articles are also the most numerous of all Karakalpak rugs. The karshin is a bag for garments and other cloth articles. Its average dimensions are 108-110 x 30-32 cm. It is placed in the lower part of the bedding (juk), which is placed on the trunk (sanduk). It consists of two parts: a face side woven in pile or mixed technique and a flatwoven back. The karshin is placed so that its face is visible. The eshik kas is a decorative rug for the inside, upper part of the yurt entrance. On its right and left sides are two white bands, ishki jambu, made in combined technique.

Karshin (Long Bag), pile rug Kegeily region, early 20th century Size 93x31cm

The rugs in the collection have similar features to other Central Asia designs:
1. Monumental patterns. Usually Central Asian patterns of carpets and felts are large, with clear details and repetition;
2. Medallions form the basis of design. Pattern elements are placed symmetrically on one axis; 
3. The medallions have diagonal coloration, which produces an effect of slight movement; 
4. The rug palette is strict, modest, and has a limited quantity of colours and patterns.

Nevertheless, colour and patterns produce an impression of richness and variety, which is possible due to the alternation of main colour and pattern elements and due to their skilful combination, including the use of the background colour in pattern motifs. All of this creates a unity, and harmony of colours and patterns.

Source:  The Karakalpak Rug Collection of the Museum of Oriental Art, Moscow, by L.G. Beresneva and A. S. Teselkin with a commentary by George O'Bannon, 1995 vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 12-22.

 

 

Map of the Turkic Peoples

Note; Approximate boundaries Only.

The Altai - The ancestral homeland of the Turkic Peoples

The Turkic peoples are thought to have originated in the areas in and around the Altai Mountains of Siberia. Gradually they spread out and occupied large tracks of Siberia and Central Asia. In time groups emerged from within the Turkic horde, amongst whom are the Karluk (Uygur and Uzbek), Kipchak (Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Karakalpak and Tatar) and Oghuz (Turkmen, Azeri and Turks).  It is also regarded as the homeland of other nationalities Mongolians, Koreans and even Hungarians. The Ural-Altaic languages to whom all the groups (Turks, Mongols, Koreans and Hungarians) speak are named after the region.

Altai Mountains

The Altai Mountains are a mountain range in East-Central Asia, where Russia, China, Mongolia and Kazakhstan come together, and where the rivers Irtysh and Ob have their sources. They stretch for 1,200 miles across southwestern Mongolia from Siberia plain to the Gobi Desert. The mountains are of moderate height. There are several peaks over 4,500 meters. Those that are higher than 3,000 meters are snowcapped throughout the year. The region is rich in lakes and streams. The Ob, Irtysh and Yenisei all have their sources in the Altai. The Altai people live mainly in the broad plateaus, steppes and valleys of the ranges, where water is plentiful. The Altai complex of mountain ranges embraces the water divide mountains for all of Asia: the South Altai, the Inner Altai and the east Altai. The Mongolian Altai is connected to this mountain complex, rising to the southeast of the Siberian Altai region.

A varied region it has many landscapes forests, steppes, wild rivers, lakes, deserts, snow capped mountains and abundant wildlife.  The climate is continental with extremes in temperatures occurring between the summer and the winter. The mountains help to mitigate the extremes to some extent by causing a winter temperature inversion that produces an island of winter temperatures that are warmer than those in the Siberian taiga to the north and the Central Asian and Mongolian steppes to south and east. Even so temperatures drop as low as -48°C in the winter. The mountains are a gathering point for precipitation in a region that otherwise is dry. The most rain falls in July and August, with another smaller period of rain in late autumn. The western Altai receives around 50 centimeters of precipitation a year. The eastern Altai receives less: around 40 centimeters a year.

 Snow leopard

Natural vegetation in the region includes steppe grasses, shrubs and bushes and light forests of birch, fir, aspen, cherry, spruce, and pines, with many clearings in the forest. These forest merge with a modified taiga. Among the animals are hare, mountain sheep, several species of deer, bobac, woodchucks, lynx, polecats, snow leopards, wolves, bears, argali sheep, siberian ibex, mountain goats and deer. Bird species include pheasants, ptarmigan, goose, partridge, Altai snowcocks, owls, snipes and jays. In the streams and rivers are trout, grayling and the herring-like sig.

Siberian ibex

Karakalpak (Қарақалпақ тили / Qaraqalpaq tili)

Karakalpak is a Turkic language mainly spoken by Karakalpaks in Karakalpakstan (Uzbekistan) a language that belongs to the Kipchak or north-western category of the Turkic-Altaic family of languages, along with Kazakh, Bashkir, and Nogay.

It is spoken as their first language by about 600,000 people in the Karakalpakstan Autonomous Republic in Uzbekistan, where the language has official status. (Many Aral Uzbeks and Kazakhs in Karakalpakstan also speak the language as well as their own). There are some Karakalpak speakers in Afghanistan, Russia, Kazakhstan and Turkey as well. Ethnic Karakalpaks who live in other parts of Uzbekistan tend to speak local Uzbek dialects.

Karakalpak is a member of the Kypchak Turkic family of languages, which includes Tatar, Kumyk and Kazakh. The Kypchak family is a subgroup of the Turkic languages. Within the Kypchak Turkic family. Karakalpak is most closely related to Kazakh and Nogai, and has absorbed a lot of vocabulary and some grammar from Uzbek as well as some Uzbek and Russian vocabulary (word share). Due to its proximity to the Uzbek language area, much of the vocabulary and grammar has an Uzbek influence. Like Finnish, Hungarian, and Turkish, Karakalpak has vowel harmony, is agglutinative and has no grammatical gender. Word order is usually subject–object–verb.

The Ethnologue identifies two dialects of Karakalpak: Northeastern and Southwestern. Menges mentions a third possible dialect spoken in the Fergana Valley. The Southwestern dialect has č for the Northeastern š.

Karakalpak has 21 native consonant phonemes and regularly uses 4 non-native phonemes in loan words.



Vowel Harmony
Vowel harmony functions in Karakalpak much as it does in other Turkic languages. Words borrowed from Russian or other languages may not observe rules of vowel harmony, but the following rules usually apply:

a may be followed by a, ɯ
æ may be followed by e, i
e may be followed by e, i
i may be followed by e, i
o may be followed by a, o, u, ɯ
œ may be followed by e, i, œ, y
u may be followed by a, o, u
y may be followed by e, œ, y
ɯ may be followed by a, ɯ

Personal Pronouns
men - I
sen - you (singular)
ol - he, she, it, that
biz - we
siz - you (plural)
olar - they

Numbers
bir 1, eki 2, u'sh 3, to'rt 4, bes 5, altı 6, jeti 7, segiz 8, tog'ıs 9, on 10, ju'z 100, mın' 1000

Karakalpak was written in the Arabic and Persian script until 1928, in the Latin script (with additional characters) from 1928 to 1940, after which Cyrillic was introduced. Following Uzbekistan's independence in 1991, the decision was made to drop Cyrillic and revert to the Latin alphabet (1994). Whilst the use of Latin script is now widespread in Tashkent, its introduction into Karakalpakstan remains gradual.

The Latin, Cyrillic and Arabic alphabets are shown below:

Latin

Cyrillic

Arabic

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karakalpak_language