Syriac Writings and Turkic Language according to Central Asian Tombstone Inscriptions †
Wassilios
Klein
Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute
George A. Kiraz
James E. Walters
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Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute
2002
Vol. 5, No. 2
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https://hugoye.bethmardutho.org/article/hv5n2klein
Wassilios KLEIN
Syriac Writings and Turkic Language according to Central Asian Tombstone Inscriptions †
https://hugoye.bethmardutho.org/pdf/vol5/HV5N2Klein.pdf
Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies
Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute, 2002
vol 5
issue 2
Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies is an electronic journal dedicated to the study
of the Syriac tradition, published semi-annually (in January and July) by Beth
Mardutho: The Syriac Institute. Published since 1998, Hugoye seeks to offer the
best scholarship available in the field of Syriac studies.
Syriac Studies
Syriac
Turkic
Tomb Inscriptions
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This paper presents the characteristics and
pecularities in the Syriac tombstone inscriptions found near
the Kirghiz capital Bishkek and nearby Tokmak. After a brief
note on the use of Syriac as an ecclesiastical language amongst
Turkic communities, the paper proceeds to show how those who
erected the inscriptions were not familiar with Syriac, and
then discusses forms of the letters used in the
inscriptions.
1. Introduction
[1] This
paper presents the characteristics of Syriac writing based on
Central Asian tombstone. The study is not a philologist one;
rather, it aims at presenting some of the pecularities in the
said tombstone inscriptions, from the standpoint of research
into the history of religion.
[2] Over 100
years ago, around 600 tombstones were found near the Kirghiz
capital Bishkek and nearby Tokmak, and they were edited very
promptly by Daniil A. Chwolson.
Paper presented at the Conference of the
American Oriental Society 2001 in Toronto/Canada.
This was followed by further
finds in the former Mongolian administrative town of Almalyk in
the Kazakh-Chinese border area and from the Kirghiz Issyk-Kul,
but these were individual items. During the Soviet period,
Cetin Džumagulov published many newly-discovered
inscriptions.
His most important publications are: Ч.
Джумагулов,
Эпиграфика
Киргиз ии,
выпуск 1-3,
Фрунзе 1963, 1982, 1987
(Академия
наук
Киргизской
ССР,
Институт
языка и
литературы).
Recent finds of around 40 tombstones on Kirghiz
territory show clearly that the actual Christian center, with a
large cemetery, was at Bishkek, whereas the second cemetery of
Burana, near Tokmak, yielded relatively modest finds
Cf. Wassilios Klein, Das nestorianische
Christentum an den Handelswegen durch Kyrgyzstan bis zum 14.
Jh., Turnhout 2000 (Silk Road Studies 3), and: Wassilios
Klein, Christliche Reliefgrabsteine des 14. Jahrhunderts von
der Seidenstraße, Ergänzungen zu einer
alttürkischen und zwei syrischen Inschriften sowie eine
bildliche Darstellung, in: VI Symposium Syriacum 1992,
University of Cambridge, Faculty of Divinity 30 August –
2 September 1992, hrsg. v. René Lavenant, Rom 1994
(Orientalia Christiana Analecta 247), 419-442; Wassilios Klein,
Nestorianische Inschriften in Kirgizistan: Ein
Situationsbericht, in: Symposium Syriacum VII, Uppsala
University, Department of Asian and African Languages, 11
– 14 August 1996, edited by René Lavenant, S. J.,
Roma 1998 (Orientalia Christiana Analecta 256), 661-669.
All these
tombstones can be dated from circa 1250 to 1342, in Almalyk up
to the 1370s.
2. Syriac as an ecclesiastical language in Turkic
communities
[3] Apart
from the St.-Petersburg scholars Daniil Chwolson and Wilhelm
Radloff, it was primarily the Marburg-based ecclesiastical
historian Wolfgang Hage who examined the relationship between
local vernacular languages and the Syriac of the church in the
'Nestorian' mission to Asia.
Wolfgang Hage, Einheimische Volkssprachen und
syrische Kirchensprache in der nestorianischen Asienmission,
in: Erkenntnisse und Meinungen, Festschrift für Werner
Strothmann zum 70. Geburtstag, Bd. 2, hrsg. v. Gernot
Wießner, Wiesbaden 1978 (Göttinger Orientforschungen
1. Reihe: Syriaca, Bd. 17), 131-160.
Their observations tally almost
completely with my own. I would like to draw your attention to
a few characteristic points:
[4] Together
with Christianity and the Syriac language, Syrian proper names
were also brought to Central Asia. A large number of Turkic
proper names were retained, but they were supplemented with
Syrian names. So in addition to biblical names such as
Abrāhām and Marqōs, those of
popular saints such as Gīwargīs and
Sargīs, and those of theologians who were important
to Syrian Christianity, such as Nestōrīs and
Dīdōrōs, we also
find original Syrian theophore names, such as
c
Abdīšōc
(servant of
Jesus),
Hnānīšōc
(mercy
of Jesus), Sabrīšōc
(trust
in Jesus), and finally also names that had their origins in the
life of the Church, such as Yaldā (birth),
Denhā (epiphany),
Saumā (fast),
Qyāmā (m.) and Qyāmtā (f.)
(resurrection), Šlīhā (apostle), etc.
Hage, Volkssprachen (footn. 4), 141-143.
[5] Titles
were preserved in the form in which the Syrians brought them.
Examples are those of the metropolitan, archdeacon,
chorepiskopos, periodeut and visitator, and of the
priest and other clergy. We also find Syriac words in Turkic
inscriptions, such as mhaymnā "believer" and
qabrā "grave".
Hage, Volkssprachen (footn. 4),
144-145.
[6] Syriac
greeting formulae, such as "bless, my Lord" or "the Cross is
victorious", were according to Grīgōr bar
cEbrāyā also used by Mongols in the Far
East, so that they may also have been used by the Turkic people
of Kirghizstan, although there is no concrete evidence for
this.
Hage, Volkssprachen (footn. 4),
145-146 according to Gregorius Barhebraeus, Historia
dynastarum, in: F. Risch, J. de Plano Carpini, Geschichte
der Mongolen, Leipzig 1930 (Veröffentlichungen des
Forschungs-Instituts für Vergleichende Religionsgeschichte
an der Universtität Leipzig 2, 11), 329.
[7] Among
the Syrian traditions adopted in the tombstone inscriptions was
the form of the cross. There was a large variety of
forms,
Cf. Wolfgang Hage, Crosses with Epigraphs in
Medieval Central and East Asian Christianity, in: The
Harp 8/9 (1995-1996), 375-382.
and these were sometimes combined with regional
symbols such as a Zoroastrian altar or, further towards the
Chinese East, the lotus flower.
Klein, Reliefgrabsteine (footn. 3), 425-431.
[8] The
dating of the tombstone inscriptions, which is so important to
us, is fortunately not restricted to the Turkic dating system
according to the twelve-year animal cycle, but also includes
the Seleucid era, which was used by the Syrian Christians. It
is this that makes it possible for us to establish precise
dates for the tombstones and thereby the history of the
communities. It is striking that only the Turkic-language
tombstones add the information that it is the era of Alexander,
and that the inscriptions on Chinese territory generally do not
include this dating and the resulting association with
Syria.
Hage, Volkssprachen (footn. 4),
146-147 and Klein, Das nestorianische Christentum (footn. 3),
278-283.
[9] If
Syriac dominates the tombstone inscriptions, then it follows
that it must have played a substantial role as a liturgical
language. And indeed, the Franciscan traveler Wilhelm of Rubruk
repeatedly testifies to this being the case in the 13th
century.
[10] More
astonishing is the fact that Wilhelm of Rubruk had a letter
from King Louis IX of France to the Mongol khan Sartaq
translated not only into Arabic, but also into Syriac.
Wilhelm von Rubruk, Reisen zum
Großkhan der Mongolen, Von Konstantinopel nach Karakorum
1253-1255, Neu bearbeitet und hrsg. v. Hans D. Leicht,
Stuttgart 1984 (Alte abenteuerliche Reiseberichte), 78-79.
He
must therefore have assumed that Syriac had a certain amount of
importance as a lingua franca. Whether or not he was right,
however, is questionable, when we consider that even a figure
such as the catholikos Yahballāhā III, an
Öngüt Turk from Koshang, had no knowledge of Syriac
at the time of his election.
Gregorii Barhebraei chronicon
ecclesiasticum, quod ediderunt, Latinitate donarunt J. B.
Abbeloos et Th. J. Lamy, vol. 3, Paris und Löwen 1877,
col. 453-454.
3. Lack of familiarity with the Syriac language of
the inscriptions
[11] That
neither the stonemasons nor the people who commissioned the
inscriptions were native speakers of Syriac is clear from a
large number of peculiarities in the grammar as used in the
Syriac inscriptions. The Syriac language of the inscriptions is
decidedly clumsy and, even in the most frequently recurring
formulae, it does not correspond to the Syriac feeling for
language, as the following examples illustrate:
[12] The
compound dates should have been joined together using
waw. However, this is usually missing. For example, we
see simply:
bašnat
ālp šetmā
tlātīn h
ad
"in the year one thousand six hundred and thirty-one".
Klein, Das nestorianische Christentum
(footn. 3), tombstone 41, 176.
Only
rarely are the numbers in the correct gender, a category which
is foreign to the Turkic languages. We find in the literature
the opinion that instead of the usual
trec
sar"twelve", we often
find trēn c
esar, written
using separate words, and instead of ma'' (with two
alaphs)"one hundred" we often see only m'ā
(with one alaph), which contravenes only historical
spelling, while the pronunciation mā remains
unchanged.
Hage, Volkssprachen (footn. 4), 151,
153-154.
We must say that the last example and others
occur often in manuscripts and are very common.
Thesaurus Syriacus, ed. by R. Payne
Smith, vol. 2, Oxford 1901 (reprints Hildesheim), col. 1985.
[13] Some
account was taken of gender when specifying the sex of the
deceased person, but only in a somewhat peculiar way. The
phrase "this is the grave of N. N.", which recurs on almost
every tombstone, is modified in such a way that the
introductory demonstrative pronoun does not, as one might
expect, refer as a copula to the masculine word for "grave",
together with a following enclitic personal pronoun, but is
varied according to the sex of the person buried. The only
correct usage in this context is hānaw qabreh,
which is indeed used only for boys and men. For women and
girls, on the other hand, the incorrect hd'hy/hdy/hdhy
(for hādāy) qabrāh is generally
used.
Hage, Volkssprachen (footn. 4),
149-151.
[14]
Immediately after this formula comes the proper name. According
to the rules, this should be introduced by the prefix d.
However, this is usually missing: hānau qabreh
arslān "this is the grave of Arslan".
Klein, Das nestorianische Christentum
(footn. 3), tombstone 41, 176. Hage, Volkssprachen
(footn. 4), 150-151.
[15] The
prepositions b, l, and
cal are
occasionally missing. The concluding formula
lc
ālmīn "for ever", for
example, occurs without the preposition l.
Hage, Volkssprachen (footn. 4),
151-152.
[16] The
orthography leaves a great deal to be desired, so that in some
cases it is impossible to work out the correct pronunciation
without knowledge of the word in question. Thus we sometimes
find the very frequent and therefore well-known word
mhaymnā "the believer" in the forms mhymny'
and myhymn' extended by a yodh in the wrong
place. Letters are exchanged, as in g'ywt'
( gayūtā "glory"), which
becomes g'wyt'.
Hage, Volkssprachen (footn. 4), 152.
[17]
Occasionally the orthography suffers not only from lack of
knowledge, but also from the influence of a Turkic feeling for
language. Double consonants in initial position have as far as
possible been avoided. An example of this are the forms
tylt' and
tylyt' for the correct
tlyt' (
telaytā "girl". That the dentals
t
eth and taw have
sometimes been confused is evidenced
A Compendious Syriac Dictionary founded
upon the Thesaurus Syriacus of R. Payne Smith, ed. by
J. Payne Smith, Oxford 1903 (reprint from 1985), 170 and 608.
in the following
example:
twrk'yt instead of
twrk'yt (
t
ūrkāyit
"Turkish"). The same also occurs with the
gutturals gamal and kaph. For example, we
find kmyr' instead of gmyr'
(gmīrā "perfect").
Hage, Volkssprachen (footn. 4), 153.
[18] It
was not at all uncommon to follow the actual pronunciation,
rather than the historical orthography. Examples of this are
slyw' instead of
slyb' (
slībā cross) and also the word
qabrāh "her grave", which appears on almost every
tombstone, and in the form qwrh is orthographically
incorrect, but accurately represents the phonetic spellings of
Eastern Syriac.
Hage, Volkssprachen (footn. 4),
153-154.
This also occurs in Syriac manuscripts.
4. The use of Syriac script for Turkic
inscriptions
[19] The
use of the Syriac script leads to difficulties because not all
Turkic phonemes were covered by a corresponding symbol in the
Syriac alphabet. There were two approaches to solving this
problem, which I shall demonstrate using a specific example of
an inscription from the Mongol residence town of Almalyk. The
Mongol residence of the Chagatai ulus, Almalig, founded as late
as the 13th century, is situated to the East of the
Chu Valley, in the valley of the upper Ili. The few tombstones
found there are divided into Turkic and Syriac. In their
external form they appear - unlike the tombstones of the Chu
Valley - to have preferred the low relief technique. Apart from
this, they are very similar to the Chu Valley tombstones. The
first point I would like to mention is that the text is written
vertically, as was already the norm on Syriac-language
tombstones.
Transcription:
aleksandros qan sakïš
mig altï yüz
yitmiš
toquz ärti bicin yïl
qutlunŋ tärim quštanc
ärtdi käcdi bu yirtüncü-
tin atï yat bolsun amïn
Translation:
According to the computing of
Alexander Khan it was
one thousand six hundred and seventy-nine (= 1368 AD),
that is the year of the monkey:
the grace-endowed Tärim Kuštanč
went across [and] departed this world.
May her name be remembered. Amen.
Klein, Christliche Reliefgrabsteine (footn.
2), 431-437.
[20] The
available characters were used for similar sounds, just as we
do today when we want to transcribe foreign words using, for
example, the symbols available on the 7-bit ASCII code. The
Turkic front vowel ä was represented at the beginning of
the second word in the third line by yodh.
However, the same sound is also written in this and in one
other inscription
С. Е.
Малов,
Памятники
древнетюркской
письменности
Монголии
и
Киргизии,
Москва 1959
(Академия
Наук СССР,
Институт
языкознания),
78 f. in connection with fig. 22.
as alaph (e.g. second word in
the fourth line, first word in the fifth line). No distinction
was made between the Turkic sounds i and ï, normally
distinguished as front and back; both were written as
yodh. In Turkic vowel harmony, the distinction between
the front vowel ü and the back vowel u is also important,
but for these, together with the sound o, our inscription has
only one letter, the waw. Among the consonants, it is
striking that the soft g [gamma] is not
necessarily written as gamal, but rather as
cayn.
More examples: Ч.
Джумагулов,
Язык
сиро-тюркских
(несторианских)
памятников
Киргизии,
Фрунзе 1971
(Академия
Киргизской
ССР, Отдел
востоковедения),
122; П. К.
Коковцовъ,
Кь
сиро-турецкой
эпиграфик
á Семир
á
чья,
in: Извест
Ý
я
Императорской
академ
Ý
и
наукъ,
Санкт-Петербург
1909, 773-796 and plate, here 778.
The same applies to the soft b,
which is written as pe instead of beth. Finally,
there is nothing in Syriac that corresponds to the Turkic sound
č. It was written using the otherwise rare
sadhe, which was apparently felt to sound
similar. The Turkic word for monkey, bičin (third
line), was therefore written psyn.
[21] For
an additional guttural, a special symbol was created based on
the Syriac k and supplemented by a diacritic check-mark.
The result was a letter that is so similar to the Arabic
kāf that it could lead to confusion, but unlike the
latter, which has a final form, it can occur in any position in
the word and can also connect both to the left and to the
right. The letter was used for a sound that corresponded to
h
, for example in the word
han.
[22] If I
have lamented the inadequate orthography of the Syriac, we
should not draw any far-reaching conclusions about lack of
knowledge of the language on the part of the authors of the
tombstone inscriptions. This is because it emerges that the
orthography of the Turkic parts of these inscriptions is no
better. Instead of the correct
tbyšk'n (
tavïškani. e. hare), the
k is simply omitted:
tbyš'n.
Hage, Einheimische Volkssprachen
(footn. 5), 152.
The stonemasons were here
as elsewhere illiterate, uneducated people. So we should not
draw too many conclusions about the education of their
customers.
5. The forms of the letters
[23] The
letters used on the tombstones basically follow the Estrangelo
script. However, there are already small changes, so that
Chwolson speaks of the "transition from Estrangelo to the
modern Nestorian script".
Chwolson, Grabinschriften 1890
(footn. 1), 119.
If we look at the table of
characters put together so carefully by Julius Euting,
In Chwolson, Grabinschriften 1890
(footn. 1), appendix; abridged version: Theodor Nöldeke,
Kurzgefasste Syrische Grammatik, Anhang: Die
handschriftlichen Ergänzungen in dem Handexemplar Theodor
Nöldekes und Register der Belegstellen bearbeitet von
Anton Schall, Darmstadt 1977, appendix.
which
is still useful given the lack of a Syriac paleography, we
notice several changes.
Klein, Reliefgrabsteine, (footn. 3),
433-434.
[24] The
tombstone inscriptions show a tendency to connect to the left
letters that according to the rules of orthography should under
no circumstances be connected to the left, for example the
waw.
[25] A
second innovation is the use of ligature for taw-alaph,
which was to become the norm in the Nestorian script, but is
new in Estrangelo.
[26] In
addition, a new letter form emerges for the Alaf. In the second
line of the above inscription, the second letter of the second
word is very difficult to read because its form deviates from
the usual ’alaph. The high line slanting towards
the right is also common in other inscriptions, but the small
check-mark underneath usually goes towards the right from the
bottom of the vertical line, or crosses the vertical line. Here
it runs upwards towards the left, so that the letter takes the
form of a check-mark (√). Since no other letter has a
similar form, it cannot have been confused with anything else.
Euting's table of characters simply needs to be supplemented.
The unusual form is somewhat confusing, because the usual form
is also used in our inscription (second word of the fifth line,
third word of the sixth line, fifth word of the sixth
line).
[27] The
rish is written twice without a diacritic point and can
then hardly be deciphered, because it is easily confused with
daleh, zayn, yodh, or nun.
[28] The
above short inscription of six lines has already shown that we
can by no means speak of orthographical consistency. Of course,
we cannot expect an orthography in the sense of a normalized
spelling system, but surely we can expect the representation of
each phoneme by the same character each time. This is not the
case either here or in other Turkic texts, and it does not
exactly make it easier to decipher these inscriptions,
particularly as they are not in general carefully chiseled,
and, as in the Syriac, plene spelling of the vowels, or any
other vowel indication, is not usual.
6. The Turkic inscriptions from China
Klein, Das nestorianische Christentum
(footn. 3), 218-225.
[29]
These comments have related to Central Asia and the specific
local characteristics. Every region has its own peculiarities,
and for this reason we should be very careful about drawing
generalized conclusions. In order at least to have mentioned
this area briefly, and at the same time to draw attention to
gaps in the research that have yet to be filled, I would like
to direct our eye further towards to the East, to China. Unlike
the Christians of the Chu Valley, their Öngüt Turkic
fellow-believers on the Huanghe and in other parts of China all
formulated their inscriptions in Turkic. The external form of
the tombstones from Olon Sume-in Tor in the Ordos area, the
Huanghe curve, where the Christian Öngüt owned a
kingdom dependent on the Mongols, is also completely different.
The tombstones from this region are not unhewn rocks from the
riverbed, but monoliths in the form of sarcophagi.
Desmond Martin, Preliminary Report on
Nestorian Remains North of Kuei-hua, Suiyüan, in:
Monumenta Serica 3 (1938) (Reprint New York 1970),
232-249 and plates V-XIV, here 246 fig. 3.
They
have short inscriptions on top. The cross shapes represented
differ from those of the Chu in that they include fewer
decorations in the form of precious stones, and instead are
often based on the lotus flower. The inscriptions are extremely
short and follow the simple scheme: "Bu quwra ...
nïŋ
ol" (this is the grave of ...). No date is given. There
are numerous and often very long Turkic-language inscriptions
in Syriac script from the South Chinese port of Quanzhou,
formerly Zaitun. In addition to the sarcophagus form known from
the Öngüts, Zaitun has another form: tombstones that
resemble altars. By far the majority of these inscriptions,
already collected by our Chinese colleague Yang Qin Zhan, have
not yet been edited, although they include particularly
interesting bi- and tri-lingual inscriptions that have Syriac,
Chinese and Latin in addition to the Turkic main text. In any
case, they are of a completely different character to the
Central Asian tombstones, and still need to be studied and
evaluated by turkologists to a degree that is worthy of their
significance. Texts in Turkic written in Syriac script have
also been found at Bulayïq and Qurutqa,
P. Zieme, Zu den
nestorianisch-türkischen Turfantexten, in: Sprache,
Geschichte und Kultur der altaischen Völker,
Protokollband der XII. Tagung der Permanent International
Altaistic Conference 1969 in Berlin, Hrsg. v. Georg Hazai u.
Peter Zieme, Berlin 1974 (Schriften zur Geschichte und Kultur
des Alten Orients 5), 661-668, here 665-668.
but here we leave
the stone inscriptions.
_______
Notes
1 D. Chwolson, Syrisch-Nestorianische
Grabinschriften aus Semiretschie, Nebst einer Beilage:
"Über das türkische Sprachmaterial dieser
Grabinschriften von W. Radloff, mit drei phototypischen Tafeln
und einer ebensolchen, von Julius Euting ausgearbeiteten
Schrifttafel, St.-Pétersbourg 1890 (Mémoires des
l´Académie Impériale des Sciences de
St.-Pétersbourg, VIIe série, Tome XXXVII, No. 8);
D. Chwolson, Syrisch Nestorianische Grabinschriften aus
Semiretschie, Neue Folge, St.-Pétersbourg
1897.