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RouranFirst GöktürkTang ruleSecond GöktürkUyghurKirghizHunsWestern GöktürkTürgeshKarlukKhazar
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A rock face thirty to forty metres high on the bank of the Tamir river, in Tamir district of Arkhangay province in central Mongolia, carries writing in Khitan, Sogdian, Chinese, Tibetan, runiform Old Turkic, Uyghur, Mongol and Arabic script.[1] The Old Turkic texts are painted, not cut, and thirty-four of them are known.[2] They are named after the place, Hoyto Tamir, or after the Mongolian name of the rock, Tayhar.[3] Three of them have animal-year dates, which have been placed in 753 and 756.[4] The editors assign others to the age of the Uyghur Khaganate by the tamga cut at their end.[5]

Rock and copies

The first copies were made in 1893 by D. A. Klementz, who took down ten texts.[2] Granö later copied twenty-six, and in 1960 Perlee made copies that the editors call unreliable.[2] Photographs were published in 1968.[2] From 1976 the Kazakh Turkologist Sartkocaulı Harcavbay went to the rock on seventeen journeys and copied nineteen texts.[2]

The edition prints twenty-one texts: Harcavbay’s nineteen and two of Klementz’s that Harcavbay did not copy. Thirteen further texts that Granö copied are listed but not published.[2] The editors rank the copies by reliability, with Harcavbay’s first, Klementz’s second, Granö’s third and Perlee’s fourth. They expect the number of texts to rise and ask for a new study by a commission.[6]

The numbers I to XXI follow Harcavbay’s count and differ from the numbers of earlier editions. The editors ask that every citation say which count it follows.[7]

Technique

The runiform texts are painted in black and, in one case, in red, with a brush, a feather or a pointed wooden pen.[1] The text in red is the fifth of the edition.[8]

The editors report that the writing cannot be seen in sunlight and shows on wet rock. Harcavbay found his texts in the rain, marked the places, and copied them while wetting the rock with water.[9]

The dated texts

Three texts give a date by the animal cycle. Text II names a monkey year, the seventh month and the fifteenth day. Text XV names a monkey year, the ninth month and the second day. Text XVI names a snake year and the tenth month.[10] Louis Bazin’s reckoning, which the editors follow, converts the monkey year into 756 and the snake year into 753.[10] The days in the editors’ table and in their notes differ slightly for two of the texts, and they read one day differently from Bazin. Only the years are therefore given here.[11]

Both years fall within the reign of Bayanchur Khan, which ran on the usual count from 747 to 759.

Content of the texts

Text II has been read in two ways. In Harcavbay’s reading the writer went in the seventh month to a place whose name is uncertain, spent the summer on a hill, and reached in autumn a place called Toriyın Taş. Harcavbay takes this for the old Turkic form of the Mongolian name Tayhar. Bazin reads the first place name as tabçag and the last verb as “I returned” where Harcavbay reads “I reached”. The editors find Bazin’s reading possible and do not decide between the two.[12]

Three texts speak of travelling to Beshbalik. They are texts XIV, XV and XVI. The last two are the dated ones, and the reckoning sets them in 756 and 753.[13] In text XV a word that the editors do not explain stands before the name.[14]

The readings give personal names and titles, several of them with the editors’ question marks. In text V the writer calls himself İbris Apa Çor and says that he wrote at the age of twenty-eight, in the editors’ reading, where Granö’s copy has a different number word. The same text names Töles Bilge Beg, Toñy Begi and Tagay İrkin.[8] The titles çor, irkin, tarkan, tegin and beg are among them; see chur, irkin, tarkhan, tegin and beg.[15] Text VI names a Tengriken Alp Kutlug Bilge Kan in its first line and speaks in its fifth of the land of an Alp Kutlug Bilge Kagan. Two other copies give other readings for several of its lines, and the editors do not identify the khan with any ruler known from elsewhere.[16]

Names of peoples occur as well. Tardush stands in texts III and XIV and Türgesh in texts VIII and XIII, in lines too damaged to say whether they are tribal names or parts of personal names.[17] On the peoples see Tolis and Tardush and Türgesh.

Reliability

The Hoyto Tamir texts are short personal records and not state monuments, as the stelae of Tariat and Šine-Usu are. If the dates and readings hold, they show that people of the Uyghur age still painted the runiform script in the 750s, and that some of them wrote of a journey to Beshbalik.

Every reading is provisional. The edition is a preliminary one made from copies, and the editors mark gaps, damaged signs and their own doubts.[18]

References

  1. ^ a b Sertkaya 2000, p. 314
  2. ^ a b c d e f Sertkaya 2000, p. 314–317
  3. ^ Sertkaya 2000, p. 313–314
  4. ^ Sertkaya 2000, p. 318
  5. ^ Sertkaya 2000, p. 318, 325, 327
  6. ^ Sertkaya 2000, p. 317
  7. ^ Sertkaya 2000, p. 317–318
  8. ^ a b Sertkaya 2000, p. 324
  9. ^ Sertkaya 2000, p. 315–316
  10. ^ a b Sertkaya 2000, p. 318, 320, 339, 341
  11. ^ Sertkaya 2000, p. 318, 320–321, 339
  12. ^ Sertkaya 2000, p. 320–321
  13. ^ Sertkaya 2000, p. 318, 339, 341
  14. ^ Sertkaya 2000, p. 337–341
  15. ^ Sertkaya 2000, p. 324–330, 343
  16. ^ Sertkaya 2000, p. 325–326
  17. ^ Sertkaya 2000, p. 322, 330, 335–338
  18. ^ Sertkaya 2000, p. 313–346

Sources

Literature

  • Osman Fikri Sertkaya; Sartkocaulı Harcavbay, Hoyto Tamir (Moğolistan)’dan yeni yazıtlar (ön neşir) (2000)

Related

What links here4

States
Uyghur Khaganate
Places
Beshbalik
Peoples
Kipchak · Türgesh

Cite this article

Yavuz, Emre-E. “Hoyto Tamir inscriptions.” Turkic Atlas, revised 8 November 2026. https://turkicatlas.org/sources/hoyto-tamir-inscriptions/

Last revised: 8 November 2026