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| Old Uyghur alphabet | |
|---|---|
| Name | Old Uyghur alphabet |
| Type | Abjad-derived script |
| Time | 8th–18th centuries CE |
| Languages | Old Uyghur language, Old Turkic, Sogdian, Chinese (occasionally) |
| Family | Sogdian alphabet → Aramaic alphabet |
Old Uyghur alphabet
The Old Uyghur alphabet originated in Central Asia and served as a principal writing system for the Uyghur people and their polities across the Tarim Basin and the Mongolian steppe, connecting the Uyghur Khaganate, Qocho Kingdom, Karakhanids and later Mongol Empire administrations. Adopted from a descendant of the Sogdian alphabet and ultimately traceable to the Aramaic alphabet, the script mediated cultural exchange among the Tang dynasty, Tibet, Sogdia, Khotan, Kashgar and the Silk Road urban networks. As a vehicle for religious, legal, administrative and literary texts, Old Uyghur inscriptions and manuscripts document relations with the Buddhist clergy, Manichaean missionaries, Nestorian Church communities and later Islamic institutions.
Old Uyghur writing emerged after the collapse of the Second Turkic Khaganate and the rise of the Uyghur Khaganate in the 8th century CE, when scribal traditions from Sogdia, Samarkand, Bukhara and Khotan converged with Turkic court culture. Following the destruction of the Uyghur Khaganate by the Kirghiz in 840 CE, Uyghur elites migrated southward to the Turfan Basin around Qocho and Gaochang, where the script continued in administrative use under the Kingdom of Qocho and in literary production patronized by the Buddhist monasteries and local patrons. Contacts with the Tang dynasty and later the Mongol Empire facilitated script usage for diplomatic correspondence with the An Lushan Rebellion-era courts and for documentation within the Yuan dynasty bureaucracy. From the 10th to the 14th centuries the script was used across a network including Kara-Khanid Khanate, Khwarezm, and the oasis cities of the Tarim Basin, while later Islamicization and the adoption of Arabic alphabet-based orthographies reduced its status by the early modern period.
The Old Uyghur script is a cursive, primarily right-to-left script descended from the Sogdian alphabet, itself derived from the Aramaic alphabet lineage shared with the Hebrew alphabet and Syriac alphabet. Letters show positional variants—initial, medial, and final forms—reflecting adaptation for continuous handwriting used in chancelleries and monastic scriptoria in centers such as Turfan and Dunhuang. Orthography records long and short vowels differently depending on religious or secular context, influenced by scribal practices in Buddhist and Manichaean manuscripts and by lexical borrowing from Sogdian and Chinese. Use of ligatures and abbreviation symbols parallels contemporary practices in Pahlavi and Syriac scripts, while administrative seals and monumental inscriptions display formalized epigraphic variants associated with courts in Qocho and caravan cities like Kashgar.
Grapheme-to-phoneme mapping in Old Uyghur presents correspondences to Turkic phonology attested in contemporaneous inscriptions and comparative reconstructions tied to the work of scholars studying sources from Karashar, Khotan, and Turfan. Consonant series preserve stops, fricatives and approximants corresponding to Proto-Turkic segments reconstructed in comparative studies alongside loan phonemes from Sogdian and Middle Chinese reflected in transcribed names of rulers and monasteries. Vowel representation often relies on matres lectionis and diacritic conventions inherited from Sogdian practice, producing ambiguities that modern philologists resolve via comparison with bilingual inscriptions involving Chinese and Pali transliterations found in monastic libraries such as Dunhuang Mogao Caves. Phonotactic patterns evident in legal and poetic texts illuminate processes like vowel harmony and consonant assimilation documented in medieval Turkic grammars preserved in Kashgar and in the work of later chroniclers like Rashid al-Din.
The corpus of Old Uyghur texts includes manuscripts from archaeological collections, cave libraries, and private collections recovered across the Tarim Basin, Turfan oasis, and Dunhuang cache, comprising Buddhist sutras, Manichaean hymns, administrative letters, legal codes, private contracts, and epistolary documents. Important findspots include the Dunhuang Caves (Mogao), the Turfan expeditions’ repositories, and tomb contexts near Qocho and Kumtura. Extant materials are preserved in institutions such as the British Library, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Hermitage Museum, National Library of China, and collections in Kashgar and Urumqi, and they include bilingual and multilingual manuscripts featuring Sogdian, Chinese, Tibetan, and Arabic texts. Epigraphic evidence comprises stelae, temple inscriptions, and administrative seals that corroborate paleographic stages and regional script variants, enabling chronological sequencing and provenance assessments used by manuscript cataloguers and paleographers.
The Old Uyghur script served as a major conduit for script transfer across Inner Asia: its orientation and letter forms contributed to the development of the later Mongolian script used by the Mongol Empire and successor polities, and its graphemic legacy influenced scripts employed by the Oirat and Buryat peoples. Through Uyghur scribal networks, elements of its orthographic practice reached Islamic scriptoriums in Central Asia and informed local adaptations in oasis towns such as Hotan and Yarkand. The script’s role in transmitting Buddhist and Manichaean literature linked it to the textual cultures of Kucha, Khotan, and Kashgar, shaping regional literary canons and administrative record-keeping that persisted into contacts with the Ming dynasty and early modern caravan states.
Decipherment and scholarly analysis of Old Uyghur accelerated with 19th- and 20th-century expeditions by scholars and institutions including the German Turfan expeditions, Aurel Stein, and Russian and Chinese archaeologists working in the Tarim Basin. Philologists such as Vilhelm Thomsen and later specialists in Turkic paleography applied comparative methods linking the script to Sogdian and Aramaic models, while modern researchers at universities and museums in Uppsala, Leningrad (Saint Petersburg), Paris, London, and Beijing have produced grammars, catalogues, and critical editions. Current scholarship integrates digital palaeography, corpus linguistics, and multispectral imaging conducted by teams associated with institutions like the British Museum and national archives to refine readings, restore palimpsests, and reassess chronology, contributing to ongoing debates regarding dialectal diversity, liturgical transmission, and administrative literacy in medieval Inner Asia.
Category:Alphabets Category:Uyghur history Category:Scripts of Central Asia