Khöshöö Tsaidam

Khöshöö Tsaidam is the place in the Orkhon valley where the monuments of Kül Tegin and Bilge Khan stand. It lies about 400 kilometres from Ulaanbaatar, some 30 kilometres south of the lake Ugei-nor and 40 kilometres north of the ruins of Karakorum.^[1] The name is also the name of a lake. The complex of Bilge Khan lies about a kilometre south of the monument of Kül Tegin, between the Orkhon and that lake.^[2] The monument of Kül Tegin stands in the district of Khashaat in the province of Arkhangai.^[3]

The monuments

Five monuments stand in the group. Two of them are large, one for Bilge Khan and one for his younger brother Kül Tegin. The other three are small, and they were raised for people whose names are unknown.^[4] The stelae of the two large monuments carry the Kül Tegin inscription of 732 and the Bilge Khan inscription of 735.^[5] Both stelae have a Chinese and a Turkic text, and the two texts are not the same. Comparing them let scholars read the Old Turkic script.^[6]

Discovery

The Russian scholar N. M. Yadrintsev found the group on 18 July 1889.^[1] A Finnish expedition under A. O. Heikel followed in 1890, and a Russian expedition under W. Radloff began work in 1891.^[1] A second account of the first survey gives the same year and the same leader.^[7]

The Kül Tegin complex

A Czechoslovak-Mongolian expedition dug the complex of Kül Tegin for seven weeks from the beginning of July 1958. It found one more monument in the group.^[8]

The complex stood in a rectangular pit about six metres wide at the top and two metres deep. Timbers held its sides, and an earthen wall inside the pit, tiled, whitewashed and painted red, ran along it.^[9] The courtyard measured 67.25 by 28.25 metres and was paved with fired tiles. A gate 2.90 metres wide stood in the east wall, with two marble rams at its sides, their heads turned to each other.^[9] Eight metres inside the gate lay a marble tortoise 2.25 metres long, without its head, on which the stele had stood.^[10] Life-size figures of dignitaries and courtiers lined the way to the holy place. All of them had lost their heads.^[10]

The memorial hall stood on a platform of 13 by 13 metres, and its outer walls measured about 10.25 metres a side. Inside, an inner room of 4.40 by 4.40 metres held the lower parts of two seated figures, one taken for Kül Tegin and one for a woman of the upper class.^[11] In pits west of the platform lay the head of the statue of Kül Tegin, and in another pit lay its five-pointed crown with a bird on the brow.^[12] The article on the golden crown sets this find beside the crown found in the complex of Bilge Khan. West of the hall stood a granite block with a cylindrical hollow, taken for a sacrificial stone, and under it a hearth of charcoal and ash without bones.^[13]

A row of rough stones ran for more than three kilometres from the Zaidam salt lakes in the east up to the building. Some stood only 2.6 metres apart, and 169 of them remain. The inscriptions call such stones balbals, and the expedition took each one for an enemy killed by Kül Tegin.^[14] The articles on stone figures and on burial and balbal treat the figures and the stones.

Date and builders

The stele is dated 732, one year after the death of Kül Tegin.^[15] According to the Tang history, the emperor sent officials to make a sacrificial hall and a stone image of Kül Tegin and to set up a stone stele with a text that he wrote himself. It says also that his battles were painted on the four walls.^[16]^[17] The painted plaster that was found shows no battle scenes.^[18]

The report on the dig regards the whole complex as the work of Chinese craftsmen. Its grounds are the form, the materials and the technique, and the measures, which are whole multiples of the Chinese building unit of 86 centimetres. It counts only the balbals, the stone men and the Turkic inscriptions as Turkic.^[19] A later summary assumes Chinese artists as well, and yet it holds that the statue of Kül Tegin reflects Turkic sculpture.^[20]

Repairs and destruction

The dig found that the hall had been repaired once. The floor was laid again and the plaster renewed, and treasure hunters had already dug at the sacrificial stone.^[21]

The statues were beheaded. On the figure of Kül Tegin the neck and the crown were cut away as well, so that the damage could not be mended. The floors were torn up, and three of the four posts of the pavilion over the stele were pulled out.^[22] The report dates the wrecking either to 745, when Uyghur rule replaced Göktürk rule, or to the raid of the Yenisei Kirghiz of 840, and it prefers 745 because of the Uyghurs’ hatred of the Göktürks of the Orkhon. It names no find that decides between the two.^[22]

Graves

The dig found no grave. The report concludes that the complex of Kül Tegin was a memorial hall of the Chinese kind and that the graves lay elsewhere.^[23] It saw on a hill four kilometres away a burial mound that had not been known, and it suggested that Kül Tegin and Bilge Khan might lie there. That is the excavator’s guess.^[24]

Other views stand against this. One takes the stone chests of the smaller sites for real coffins. Another takes the sites for memorial places set apart from the graves. A third holds that a body burned after six months leaves no bone, so that the lack of bones proves nothing.^[25]

Conservation

In 1997 a Mongolian and Japanese team cleaned the stone of Kül Tegin and treated its damaged surface. Its upper part had been broken by lightning in the 1950s.^[3]

References

^ a b c Jisl 1963, p. 387
^ Bahar 2009, p. 1
^ a b Khishigbajar 2000, p. 255
^ Jisl 1963, p. 388
^ Kül Tegin inscription; Bilge Khan inscription
^ Jisl 1963, p. 387–388
^ Amartuvshin 2000, p. 19
^ Jisl 1963, p. 388–390
^ a b Jisl 1963, p. 391
^ a b Jisl 1963, p. 392
^ Jisl 1963, p. 393–394
^ Jisl 1963, p. 394–395
^ Jisl 1963, p. 389, 396
^ Jisl 1963, p. 390
^ Jisl 1963, p. 389
^ Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 194
^ Jisl 1963, p. 395
^ Jisl 1963, p. 397
^ Jisl 1963, p. 398–399
^ Durmuş 2000, p. 186–187
^ Jisl 1963, p. 396–397
^ a b Jisl 1963, p. 398
^ Jisl 1963, p. 396, 401
^ Jisl 1963, p. 401
^ Jisl 1963, p. 399–402

Sources

Literature

Lumír Jisl, Kül-Tegin anıtında 1958'de yapılan arkeoloji araştırmalarının sonuçları (1963)
Ch. Amartuvshin, Batı Moğolistan’da Bulunan Eski Türk Anıtları (2000)
Tayfun Çay; Ayhan Ceylan; İbrahim Yılmaz; İsmail Şanlıoğlu; Hakan Karabörk; Murat Yakar, Göktürk anıtlarında jeodezik çalışmalar (2000)
İlhami Durmuş, Köl Tigin Külliyesi Kalıntıları ve Türk Kültür Çevresindeki Yeri (2000)
D. Khishigbajar, Köl Tigin Yazıtı Taş Anıtının Korunması (2000)
Hasan Bahar, The Excavation and the Conservation of Bilge Khan Monumental Grave Complex in Mongolia (2009)