Ongoing work on a new catalogue of Old Turkic runiform inscriptions in the Republic of Altai based on their 3D documentation
67th Annual Meeting of the PIAC, Gotemba 2025
Old Turkic runiform inscriptions are the earliest Turkic sources providing valuable information on the history, culture and language of ancient Turkic peoples. They are written in an autochthonous script on steles, rocks and everyday objects.
Altai Old Turkic runic inscriptions are special in many ways: They consist of extremely fine, often damaged, engravings made on rock surfaces with numerous petroglyphs and graffiti overlapping them. A reliable reading of their runes themselves is difficult. They employ some signs not found in “classical” inscriptions, and a deviating orthography. Their texts are not epitaphs, but philosophical, religious or very personal texts, written by the ancient Turkic population at large. All this had hampered research on them until recently. Only in the course of the recent decades, they have become an object of special research conducted by traditional methods of documentation, which has resulted in a catalogue comprising 90 inscriptions (Tybykova et al. 2012). However, the searching and documenting of the inscriptions went on all the time also after the publication of the catalogue. At present, ca. 120 inscriptions are known in the Altai Republic.
In 2017–2020, a broad-scale 3D documentation of Altai runic inscription was conducted by an international team of researchers from Russia and Germany. The core of the team consisted of three persons—two Turcologists: Irina Nevskaya who initiated that research and worked in the field in 2017–2019 and Larisa Tybykova who organized the field work and participated in the field documentation in 2017–2020,—and an archaeologist Mikhail Vavulin a specialist in digital archaeology, who did the 3D documentation using the method that he had developed specially for “non-canonical” runiform inscriptions of the Altai Mountains (Vavulin et al. 2019). That method allows the fixation accuracy of 0.032 mm and building high resolution 3D models of inscriptions including orthophotos and height maps. E. g.: since practically all surfaces with Altai runiform inscriptions are palimpsests, the lines of petroglyphs, graffiti and inscriptions can be discerned only on the so-called “height maps” where lines having the same depth can be made visible layer by layer. All the inscriptions, discovered in the Republic of Altai by 2020, were documented by that method in the period of 2017-2020.
The lecture will deal with our ongoing work on a new catalogue based on the above-mentioned 3D documentation of Altai runic inscriptions. We have already published some revised readings of a row of inscriptions (e.g. Nevskaya et al. 2018, 2019). Here, we will present the advancement in their deciphering on the example of the inscriptions found in the vicinity of the village Tuekta. (Tybykova et al. 2012) mentions five Tuekta inscriptions. Readings of all of them could be revised thanks to their 3D documentation. Three further inscriptions were discovered in the vicinity of the village Tuekta. Thus, the surroundings of the village Tuekta can be considered one of the most important locations for Old Turkic runiform studies.
We will also discuss further perspectives of Old Turkic runic studies in Siberia.
References
Nevskaya et al. 2018: Irina Nevskaya & Larisa Tybykova & Mikhail Vavulin & Olga Zaytseva & Evgeniy Vodyasov: 3D documentation of Old Turkic Altai runiform inscriptions and revised readings of the inscriptions Tuekta-V and Bichiktu-Boom-III. In: Turkic Languages, Volume 22, 2018, Number 2, 194-216.
Nevskaya et al. 2019: Irina Nevskaya & Larisa Tybykova & Mikhail Vavulin. Kuttu I, a recently discovered Old Turkic Altai runiform inscription and its reading and interpretation // Turkic Languages, Volume 23,2019, Number 2. P. 153-162.
Tybykova et al. 2012: Tybykova, L. N., Nevskaya, I. A., & Erdal, M. (2012). Katalog drevnetjurkskix runičeskix pjamjatnikov Respubliki Gornyj Altaj. Gorno-Altajsk: Gorno-Altajskoe knižnoe izdatel’stvo.
Vavulin et al. 2019: Mikhail Vavulin, Irina Nevskaya and Larisa Tybykova. Digital macro-photogrammetry in documentation of Old Turkic runiform inscriptions in the Altai Mountains // Mediterranean archaeology & archaeometry, Vol. 19, No. 2 2019. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3239053
Key words: Old Turkic, Altai Republic, runiform inscriptions, 3D documentation, digital photogrammetry