The Jabogan inscription is a runiform text of five lines on a split piece of rock, found near the village of Jabogan in the Altai Republic.[1] It is one of the runiform inscriptions of the Altai. It is the longest of them and one of the best preserved.[2] It has no date.[3]

The stone

The rock is 57 centimetres long and 24 wide. It was split from a cliff and lay north-west of the village, in the district of Üst-Qan.[1] Erke Shatin of Jabogan found it in 1927. He cut his name, the year and the name of the village under the inscription.[1] His son found it again in 2004 and gave it to a scholar in Gorno-Altaisk. Since 2009 it has been in the republican museum.[1] A later study gives 2005 for its arrival in Gorno-Altaisk.[4]

The text has five lines, and an unevenness of the rock interrupts the second. It counts 113 signs.[2] Some of their forms are not known from other Altai texts.[2] Most are forms typical of the Yenisei inscriptions.[5]

The reading

Irina Nevskaya published the reading. Only line 3 counts as fully deciphered in it.[6] Line 3 has been interpreted as naming three horses by colour, each with a saddle of a different metal: a white horse with a gold saddle, a dark grey horse with a silver saddle and a brown horse with a bronze saddle.[7] The horse colours alliterate with the metals, and for that reason the line is taken for a piece of Old Turkic verse.[8] Part of the reading goes back to H. Şirin User, and M. Erdal doubted the rendering of the second colour as grey for a horse.[7] Nurdin Useev agrees on the first two saddles and gives the third as juniper wood.[9]

Nevskaya calls lines 1, 2, 4 and 5 unclear.[6] Line 1 runs close to a rock text of Chiyin Tash in the Tian Shan of Kyrgyzstan, with the words in reverse order. The likeness is her own observation.[7]

Date

Nevskaya gives no date.[3] She says that the final decipherment is still far off.[10]

For a phrase of the text, bitig belde, “the letter is at the waist”, one scholar proposed that the whole text could be about the medieval post.[11] That remark concerns the content, and the article on post and communication returns to it. The Turkish version of the study words it as a date after the Middle Ages, which the English version does not say.[12]

Useev places the stone in the ninth century on the strength of the verb ending -gAy.[13] The same ending occurs in some Yenisei inscriptions, so it does not date the stone by itself.[14] Until a date is shown for the stone, it cannot serve as a source for the age of the Göktürk khaganates.

References

  1. ^ a b c d Nevskaya 2012, p. 41–43
  2. ^ a b c Nevskaya 2012, p. 43
  3. ^ a b Nevskaya 2012, p. 39–48
  4. ^ Nurdin 2017, p. 106
  5. ^ Nevskaya 2012, p. 45
  6. ^ a b Nevskaya 2012, p. 44–46
  7. ^ a b c Nevskaya 2012, p. 45–46
  8. ^ Nevskaya 2012, p. 46
  9. ^ Nurdin 2017, p. 107
  10. ^ Nevskaya 2012, p. 47
  11. ^ Nevskaya 2012, p. 46–47
  12. ^ Nevskaya 2012, p. 47; 56
  13. ^ Nurdin 2017, p. 121
  14. ^ Erdal 2004, p. 10

Sources

Literature

  • Irina Nevskaya, An Old Turkic Inscription Found in the Vicinity of the Village Jabogan of the Republic Altai: Its Paleographic Analisys and Reading (türkisch: Altay Cumhuriyeti Jabogan Kasabası Çevresinde Bulunan Eski Türkçe Bir Yazıt: Metin ve Paleografik İnceleme) (2012)
  • Useev, Nurdin, Altay Yazıtlarından Yabogan (A 84) Yazıtı ve Köktürkçe Vefeyat, At Tasviri Formülleri (2017)
  • Marcel Erdal, A Grammar of Old Turkic (2004)

Related

What links here4

Places
Altai
Institutions and Titles
Post and Communication
Religions
Horse Sacrifice · Soul Words

Cite this article

Yavuz, Emre-E. “Jabogan inscription.” Turkic Atlas, revised 8 November 2026. https://turkicatlas.org/sources/jabogan-inscription/

Last revised: 8 November 2026