The Twelfth Talsk Monument

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08:04, 29 Apr 2018
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Large Boulder with Runic Inscriptions

In 1962, archaeologist D. F. Vinnik discovered another large boulder with runic inscriptions in the same area of the Talas Valley where ancient Turkic inscriptions on boulders had previously been found. The stone was transported to Frunze, to the historical museum. In the upper, flatter part of the stone, there is a poorly preserved inscription. To this day, it remains unreadable. As can be seen from the drawing (fig. 3, 4), some letters have a distinctive shape.

The sign

in this text has analogies in the inscription on a wooden stick and in the text of the fifth Talas boulder. However, it should be noted that the published drawing of the fifth boulder does not provide an accurate representation of the shape of the sign

in this text. Considering that the inscription on the twelfth boulder features archaic forms of letters

, we consider it to be the earliest of all texts on the boulders of the Talas Valley.

Fifteen years have passed since the publication of the first drawing of the text of the twelfth monument, but no attempts have been made to read it so far. We are publishing a photograph and a new drawing of the inscription for the first time, hoping that this publication will serve as an incentive for the study of its text.

In this regard, we present a comparative table of the letters of the ancient Turkic runic script of Talas and the Orkhon-Yenisei region (see Table 1): Talas I — letters found in inscriptions carved on boulders and rocks; Talas II — signs on a wooden stick. The table was compiled using tables from previously published works by I. A. Batmanov "Talas Monuments of Ancient Turkic Writing" (1971, pp. 28-29), A. S. Amanzholov "Materials and Research on the History of Ancient Turkic Writing" (ADD, 1975, pp. 21-22), A. N. Kononov "Grammar of the Language of Turkic Runic Monuments of the 7th-9th Centuries" (1980, pp. 58-59), D. D. Vasilyev "Corpus of Turkic Runic Monuments of the Yenisei Basin" (1983, p. 7). The Talas sections (I, II) have been partially supplemented.