Bang Willy, Gabain von Annemarie (eds.) Türkische Turfan-Texte. III

Berlin: Verlag der Akademie der Wissenschaften in kommission bei Walter de Gruyter U. Co., 1930. — 37 s.Before the discoveries of the Old Turkish manuscripts in Central Asia there were known only the old Turkish inscriptions from Mongolia and the Ottoman manuscripts from the West as written sources for Turkish history. The work on this text group was begun by K. Foy. The first important studies of this material were published by F.W.K. Müller in his Uigurica (1908), later growing to three volumes. His work was to be continued by Willy Bang and Annemarie von Gabain. Besides preparing further editions of texts, both of them began to use the texts as sources for investigations on old Turkish history. The Turkish part of the collection is a good example for the great variety of the Turfan texts. It consists of about 8,000 fragments of various size. These fragments are parts of scrolls, folded books, Pothi-books and blockprints. Most of them are written in the so called Uigur script, which was developed from the Sogdian, some fragments are in Sogdian script. The Turkish Manichaeans used the Manichaean and the Uigur script for writing down their texts. A small number of the fragments was written in Turkish Runic writing, but also in Syrian, Tibetan and Brahmi script. In a seal of a Mongolian document there is an Uigur signature written in 'Phags-pa script. Sometimes the script used already can give us a hint of the contents of the text. So it is certain that the Uigur Buddhists at no time used the Manichaean script and that on the other hand there are no Manichaean texts in Brahmi script.