Pelliot tibétain 1283 is a manuscript that Paul Pelliot found at Dunhuang in 1908. It now lies in the Bibliothèque nationale de France.[1] One side is Chinese. The other has two Old Tibetan texts. The second is headed Byang phyogs na rgyal po du bzhugs pa’i rabs gyi yi ge, rendered “Text on the sequence of however many kings live in the north”.[1]

The text

The heading calls the text the copy, kept in the Tibetan archive, of an order by an Uyghur king to send five men north and find out how many kings live there.[2] The text itself is not that order. It is the report in which the five set down what they had learned.[2] The Turkic original, written by the Uyghurs, has not been found. The Tibetan was translated from Turkic.[2] The view generally held dates the report to the middle of the eighth century, soon after the Uyghur khaganate arose. It holds that the Tibetans took the manuscript when they took Dunhuang later in the century.[2]

The Göktürk tribes

Lines 9 to 11 list the Göktürk tribes, twelve in all. Line 9 counts among them the tribe of a ruler called Zha ma Kha gan.[3] The manuscript has the title Zha ma Mo ngan there. The editors correct it to Kha gan, since lines 49 to 50 and 69 to 70 write it so.[3] In those lines he is a legendary ruler of the Göktürks.[3]

The report calls the Göktürks ‘Bug chor. The name may be the Tibetan form of the title that the Chinese give as Mochuo, the title of Kapgan Khan. It would then refer to the country of the eastern Göktürks. A different explanation is that it names the country around Lop Nor, west of Gansu.[2] Several tribes of the list match the tribes that Chinese sources count among the Göktürks. That supports the first view.[2]

Three of the names have been matched. A sha sde is identified with the Ashide. The Tibetan spelling is taken for a slip.[4] Shar Du-li is identified with the Sheli Tuli of the Tang Huiyao. These may be two tribes, Sheli and Tuli.[5] Hali has no Turkic form that the editor could name.[6]

The identity of Zha ma Kha gan has been explained in several ways: as Ozmish, the last khan of the Second Khaganate, as Mukan, as Bumin, as İstemi, as an ancestor of the Uyghurs, and as another name of the Ashina clan itself.[7] Most of these identifications start from the title Yama aġan in the Ongi inscription. They also start from the Chinese 射摩, Shemo, in the story of the lake goddess that Turkic Atlas gives under Turkic mythology.[7]

Three myths

The first myth stands in lines 68 to 77. In a peaceful time of his rule, Zha ma Kha gan sent an army toward a great mountain range with a sandy desert behind it. Behind that range, beyond the country of the Basmil and the tribes that lived past them, lived two tribes of the king of heaven.[2] The army could not cross the mountains, and two soldiers lost their way. They found the tracks of a female camel, followed them to a spring of clear water and met a pure woman beside a herd of female camels. She spoke Turkic and showed them the way. A pack of dogs, chasing game, came back and found the soldiers by their smell. The soldiers threw themselves to the ground before the dogs.[2] The dogs loaded ten female camels with what the soldiers needed to cross the desert, and with water, and sent the camels back to their country. In this way the two soldiers returned to their own country.[8]

The second myth stands in lines 77 to 84. The first dog came down from heaven. From it came two dogs, a red one and a black one. They mated with a she-wolf, but she was barren and could not bear young. They therefore carried off a young girl from a Turkic home and lay with her.[8] The sons born of that union were born as dogs. The daughters were born as human beings and looked like pure women.[8] The people of the red dog and the people of the black dog took their names from the dogs, Ge zir Gu shu and Ga ra Gu shu, read as Qızıl Küşü and Qara Küşü.[8] The meaning of the second word, rendered “nose” in one translation, is not settled.[8] The dogs and the women alike spoke Turkic. The women gathered the wealth and the food, cattle among it, and used it. Nobody had heard that there were men among these tribes.[8]

The third myth stands in lines 94 to 108. The manuscript is torn there. In the north lived a group of what the text calls “wild Türks”. One of them broke a leg and could not walk. Therefore his companions killed a horse before his leg, gathered a great deal of wood, gave him a flint and left him there. A tiger came to the broken leg, very tired. Behind the tiger came an animal larger than a rat. It had fur like an iron tool and a white spot the size of a thumb on its neck and on both flanks. The man shot an arrow at the white-spotted side and killed it.[9] Its body was hunched like a pig’s. Its fur was hard and spiny, running from nose to tip of tail, with a point like a sword.[9] In Turkic it was called Kog nyo yog. The editor takes it for a hedgehog or a porcupine. No Turkic word of any period is known for it.[9] The rest of the passage is damaged. It still shows a tiger and the spiny animal fighting where the man lay. Then it breaks off.[9]

Place among the sources

The three myths are counted among the myths of the Göktürks. The Chinese compilations do not have them.[1] The first tells no origin. The second derives two peoples from a dog and a Turkic girl. The third is a fragment. The report comes from a different tradition than the Chinese accounts of the wolf and the cave. It is therefore independent of them. Nothing in the three passages links them to the Ashina.

References

  1. ^ a b c Erkoç 2018, p. 71
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h Erkoç 2018, p. 72
  3. ^ a b c Erkoç 2018, p. 63
  4. ^ Erkoç 2018, p. 66
  5. ^ Erkoç 2018, p. 65
  6. ^ Erkoç 2018, p. 68
  7. ^ a b Erkoç 2018, p. 63–64
  8. ^ a b c d e f Erkoç 2018, p. 73
  9. ^ a b c d Erkoç 2018, p. 74

Literature

  • Hayrettin İhsan Erkoç, Çin ve Tibet Kaynaklarına Göre Göktürk Mitleri (2018)
  • Federica Venturi, An Old Tibetan Document on the Uighurs: A New Translation and Interpretation (2008)

Unresolved source identifiers: pelliot-tibetain-1283

Articles resting on this source 2

The Khalaj language · Turkic Mythology

Related

What links here3

Religions
Turkic Mythology
Languages
The Khalaj language
Sources
Ongi inscription

Cite this article

Yavuz, Emre-E. “Old Tibetan report on the northern kings.” Turkic Atlas, revised 8 November 2026. https://turkicatlas.org/sources/old-tibetan-northern-report/

Last revised: 8 November 2026