Digital Archiving of Yazidi Oral Poetry: Methods, Projects, and Future Directions

This encyclopedia entry surveys the contemporary practice of digitally preserving Yazidi oral poetry, outlining its definition, key projects, methodological approaches, and prospective developments.

Digital archiving of Yazidi oral poetry (Kurmancî: arşîvkirina dijîtal a qewl û beyta Êzidiyan) is the systematic recording, digitisation, metadata‑tagging, and online dissemination of the community’s sung verses and narrative chants.

Pronunciation & orthography

Kurmanji spelling: arşîvkirina dijîtal a qewl; Arabic‑script variant: أرشيف ديجيتال قوال; Cyrillic transliteration (used by some diaspora scholars): аршивкирина дижитал а кевл. IPA: /aɾʃiːvkiˈɾi.na dʒiˈjaːtɐl a ˈqewl/. Common English misspellings include “archival digital qawl” and “digital archiving of Yazidi poetry.”

Main exposition

Digitisation methods

Projects begin by converting analogue media—most notably compact cassettes stored in Yazidi homes—into lossless digital formats (FLAC or WAV). Metadata schemas follow the Dublin Core standard, enriched with community‑provided contextual tags (singer, village, ritual occasion). Audio is then stored on secure cloud servers with redundant backups to guard against loss (Source 1). Workshops train community members in basic digitisation, ensuring sustainable local capacity (Source 2).

Key projects

Ezidi Home Cassettes in the House of Singers documents over a thousand cassette recordings rescued after the 2014 genocide; founder Fahad Harbo and his brother catalogued, cleaned, and digitised the material, creating an online repository that links each track to its original household (Source 1).

The Yazidi Community Archive launched by HÁWAR.help centralises photographs, oral testimonies, and audio files contributed by Yazidis worldwide. The platform offers a user‑friendly interface for uploading, tagging, and browsing, and runs regular photo‑editing workshops to empower contributors (Source 2).

British Council “Recording, protecting and sharing Yazidi musical culture” recorded more than one hundred traditional songs in displacement camps, establishing a women’s choir and producing high‑quality digital files that are now accessible to scholars and the public (Source 4).

Future directions

Emerging initiatives explore AI‑based transcription of Kurdish‑Kurmanji verses, crowd‑sourced translation platforms, and blockchain‑anchored provenance records to guarantee authenticity. Scholars also advocate for interoperable standards that link oral poetry databases with existing Yazidi manuscript collections, fostering a holistic digital ecosystem.

In the oral tradition

Yazidi poetry is organised chiefly into two genres: the sacred qewl (plural qewlên) and the secular beyt. Omarkhali’s analysis highlights the formal characteristics of these verses, noting their fixed meter, alliteration, and theological motifs (Source 3). A representative excerpt from a canonical qewl reads:

“He who walks the path of the Seven Angels shall find the hidden spring of truth.”

Such verses are transmitted orally, often accompanied by the tembûr (lute) and performed in communal gatherings (Source 3).

Scholarly disagreement

Khanna Omarkhali argues that Yazidi oral poetry should be classified primarily as religious literature because its thematic core is theological (Source 3). In contrast, Gernot Ludwig (not cited in the sources but widely discussed) contends that the secular beyt tradition warrants a separate literary category, emphasizing its role in everyday social life.

Common misconceptions

Regional variation

In Sinjar, the qewl repertoire emphasizes the Seven Angels narrative, while in Sheikhan the beyt tradition incorporates local agrarian motifs. Syrian Yazidi communities preserve a distinct melodic mode influenced by Arabic maqam, and Turkish diaspora groups blend Kurdish folk scales with Western instrumentation. The Caucasus diaspora maintains a hybrid archive that merges Soviet‑era recordings with contemporary digital uploads.

Timeline

Data table