Reconstructing the Scope of Old Uyghur Book Forms Based on the Handwritten Remains of Half a Millennium of Literature

A Pilot Study Based on Buddhist Manuscripts

2023–2025

RFK05

Reconstruction of an Old Uyghur scroll fragment of the Säkiz Yükmäk Yaruk consisting of four fragments (U 7123 + III 550 + III 6323 + U 7124) preserved in the Berlin Turfan collections of the Berlin Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW) and the Museum für Asiatische Kunst, Berlin (AKu, SMB-PK)

Roughly 8,000 fragments of Old Uyghur manuscripts and block prints in the Berlin Turfan collections, as well as the numerous published Old Uyghur manuscript remains preserved in several Central Asian manuscript collections, mainly in St. Petersburg, London, Paris, Stockholm, Kyoto and various locations in China, form the basis for the study of the Old Uyghur book forms. These texts are the written remains of the Uyghurs, who immigrated into the Eastern Tianshan 天山region and the Gansu corridor after the collapse of their nomadic empire in Mongolia in 840. Between the 9th and 13th centuries, they held strong political power in the region (The West Uyghur Kingdom 847-1270, the Ganzhou Uyghur Kingdom 880-1035). The Uyghurs, who were in close relations with the Mongols and became their tutors in several fields like literary culture, were able to maintain their influence still after the rise of the Mongol Empire at the beginning of the 13th century and coming under strict Yuan control in the late 1270s. Besides administrative and economic documents, a small number of medical, astrological and calendar texts, fragments of religious works form the majority among the handwritten artefacts. A main feature of the surviving Old Uyghur manuscripts is their fragmentary state of preservation and the predominant lack of dating. Catalogues and editions of the Old Uyghur fragments brought to light a great diversity in the size and form of the discovered manuscript folios or preserved fragments from them.

The project aims to build the starting point of a comprehensive reconstruction of the great variety of Old Uyghur book forms on the basis of the handwritten remains, which present half a millennium of Old Uyghur literature. Buddhist literature, whose remains make up the majority among the excavated text findings, was chosen for the pilot study on the subject. According to the current state of research, the following main book forms have been proven: scrolls, pothis/pustakas of different size and form (landscape, portrait), codices of different size, and concertinas.

Some particularly popular Buddhist works have survived not only in a very large number of copies, but also in a wide range of book forms used for these copies. The creation of a relative chronology based on the tracing of the transformation of book forms that took place should help to fill the gap of missing dating information in the manuscripts. The preserved written artefacts of the apocryphal Buddhist sutra Säkiz Yükmäk Yaruk, the Old Uyghur translation of the Chinese Bayangjing, form the basis for this case study.

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Project lead: Simone-Christiane Raschmann