The Issyk inscription is a short text on a silver cup from the Issyk kurgan, a burial mound near Almaty in Kazakhstan.[1] Studies place the cup between the fifth and the third century BC.[2] Its signs have been taken for early runiform writing and tied to the Göktürks through the Saka and the Huns.[1] A second explanation takes them for the script of Iranian-speaking nomads.[3] The cup lies about a thousand years before the first dated Old Turkic text. For that reason it stands outside the secured corpus of the Old Turkic inscriptions.

The find

The cup comes from the Issyk kurgan near Almaty.[1] The burial is that of a man in a gold dress. His high pointed cap is the plainest example of the headgear of the Saka.[4] A second study calls the same find the grave of the golden warrior.[5]

One study dates the cup to the fifth and fourth century BC, a second to the fourth century, and a third to the fourth and third century.[2] The studies give these dates without the evidence for them.

The text

The studies used here give no reading of the text. The study that calls the signs runiform names no reader of them. The study that calls them Iranian reads neither the cup nor the stone of Dasht-i Navur in Afghanistan, which it sets beside it.[6]

One study takes a single feature from the cup. Its words are not divided by dots, as the words of some Talas inscriptions are.[5] From this the study concludes that the earliest texts in the Göktürk script did not divide their words.[5] The study takes the date and the script of the cup as given. The conclusion is therefore no firmer than they are.

The signs as early runiform writing

The runiform script is held to reach back to the fifth century BC, and the cup is counted among its earliest pieces. This view adds a rock carving in the Kurday mountains and holds that the script passed from the Saka to the Göktürks, with the Huns as the link between them.[1]

A second study reports that theories calling the language of a piece from Issyk Turkic, and its script one of the earliest phases of the Göktürk script, had gained ground by 2000.[7]

The chain from the Saka through the Huns to the Göktürks claims a continuity between three peoples. It is a claim about their writing, not a reading of the cup.

The signs as the script of Iranian-speaking nomads

A second explanation finds signs that look runiform on the cup and on a trilingual stone from Dasht-i Navur. It takes them for the script of the Iranian-speaking nomads of Central Asia, whom it calls forerunners of the Turkic peoples.[3]

It states the link as a condition. If it can be shown that the script of the Saka and the Yuezhi passed into the early forms of the runiform script, the stock of letter forms would be about a thousand years old or older.[3]

The same study dates the making of the standard alphabet to the sixth or seventh century AD. It takes that making for a reform of sign forms that already existed.[3]

The cup and the secured corpus

Four things keep the cup outside the secured corpus.

The oldest known runiform text is the Çoyren inscription in Mongolia, dated between 688 and 691.[8] No runiform text has been securely dated to the First Khaganate. The cup lies about a thousand years before the Çoyren stone.

No dated text in a transitional alphabet joins the two. In the debate on the origin of the letters, a text of that kind would decide the matter, and none is known.

The attribution rests on the shape of the signs. In the same debate, form alone has settled no question, because a sign may resemble a letter by descent, by accident or by choice.

The dates of the cup differ between the studies, and none of them shows what the date rests on.

All these explanations share one point. The cup carries writing.

References

  1. ^ a b c d Durmuş 2000, p. 188
  2. ^ a b Durmuş 2000, p. 188; 32; 121; Guzev 1993, p. 188; 32; 121; Şükürlü 1993, p. 188; 32; 121
  3. ^ a b c d Guzev 1993, p. 32
  4. ^ Durmuş 2000, p. 187
  5. ^ a b c Şükürlü 1993, p. 121
  6. ^ Durmuş 2000, p. 188; 32; Guzev 1993, p. 188; 32
  7. ^ Sadıkov 2000, p. 304
  8. ^ Golden 1992, p. 152

Sources

Literature

  • İlhami Durmuş, Köl Tigin Külliyesi Kalıntıları ve Türk Kültür Çevresindeki Yeri (2000)
  • Viktor G. Guzev; Sergey G. Klyaştornıy, Genel Yazı Nazariyesi Işığında Göktürk Yazısının Menşei Meselesi (Okunuşunun 100. Yıl Dönümü Dolayısıyla) (1993)
  • Elisa Cebrailoğlu Şükürlü, Göktürk Yazıtlarında Kelimelerin Noktalanması Özellikleri (1993)
  • Kasımcan Sadıkov, Özbekistan'da Bulunan Göktürk Harfli Yeni Metinler (2000)
  • Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (1992)

Related

What links here2

Peoples
Saka
Controversies
The origin of the Old Turkic script

Cite this article

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

Last revised: 8 November 2026