On the Old Uyghur wooden “name plate” and further texts recently discovered in the West Zone of the Tuyoq Grottoes in Turfan
(63rd Annual Meeting Ulaanbaatar, 2021)
A joint team of archaeologists from the Archaeological Institute of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Turfan Academy, and Kucha Academy carried out excavations in the northern portions of the eastern and western zones of the Tuyoq Grottoes within the Turfan District of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, China between the autumn of 2010 and early summer of 2011. During the excavations, archaeologists discovered a considerable number of wall paintings, wall inscriptions, wooden frames, wood pens, and texts in various scripts, including Brāhmī, Chinese, Old Uyghur, Sogdian, and Tibetan. In this paper, we will present our primary investigation on the Old Uyghur text written on three wooden pieces discovered in Cave 51 and two Old Uyghur fragments discovered in Cave 57. The wooden pieces with Old Uyghur texts should have been used as “name plate”. Of the two texts, one is of astrological content and the other one is an invocation of Buddhist content.