The Cultural History of Uyghur Literacy in Light of Multilingual and Multiscriptual Manuscripts

A Case Study of the Secular Documents

2023–2025

RFH02

A block-print fragment from the third book of a Chinese scroll of the Ekottarāgama-Sūtra (Ch 5555) preserved in the Berlin Turfan Collection of the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (BBAW). The Chinese text on the recto is followed by a reader's colophon in Uyghur block script, suggesting a dating to the Western Uyghur period (9th-12th century AD). On the verso are three more reader's colophons in Uyghur cursive script, which is characteristic of Uyghur texts from the Mongol period (13th-14th century). According to the recto colophon, a certain Tolu Tutuŋ K(ı)y-a, who was most likely Uyghur, recited the Chinese Ekottarāgama-Sūtra for his master Lisön, whose name is certainly Chinese.

This project aims to provide insights into the multicultural world of the Silk Roads by studying the usage of various scripts and languages in the Old Uyghur and Middle Mongolian corpora. The Silk Roads are usually understood as a network (or supra-network) of cultural and commercial exchange, but in fact the actual process of the cultural exchange is rarely directly tangible in the sources. In this respect the Uyghur-Mongol corpus is an exception that covers about six centuries (9th to 15th cc. CE) and offers a unique opportunity for insights into the multicultural world of the Silk Roads.

The project aims to study the usage of various scripts and languages along the Uyghur-Mongol script and the Uyghur and Mongolian languages, with a special focus on the usage of the manuscripts by their producers and readers. Due to differing states of research on sub-groups within this material the project is divided into two interconnected parts. The first (A) is a meta-analysis of published multilingual and multiscriptual Old Uyghur (hereafter OU) religious manuscripts with a focus on aspects which not yet received scholarly attention, such as the OU reader colophons for Chinese book rolls and cases where Uyghur script was used to write down Christian and Manichean texts. The second (B) is a case study of the multilingual and multiscriptual secular texts within the OU and Middle Mongolian corpus. The two parts cover considerable parts of the source material belonging to the Uyghur literary tradition and their shared focus on the production and use of multilingual and multiscriptual manuscripts and corpuses enables a consistent approach and a better understanding of intercultural exchange along the Eastern Silk Roads and Central Eurasia in the 9th to 15th centuries.

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Project lead: Márton Vér