Karabalgasun inscription - Reconstruction of the stele Heikel 1892 plate III

Karabalgasun inscription is a 9th century trilingual

inscription Epigraphy () is the study of inscriptions, or epigraphs, as writing; it is the science of identifying graphemes, clarifying their meanings, classifying their uses according to dates and cultural contexts, and drawing conclusions about the wr ...

located in the

Karabalgasun Ordu-Baliqalso spelled ''Ordu Balykh, Ordu Balik, Ordu-Balïq, Ordu Balig, Ordu Baligh'' (meaning "city of the court", "city of the army"; , ), also known as Mubalik and Karabalghasun, was the capital of the Uyghur Khaganate. It was built on the ...

, the historical capital of the first

Uyghur Khaganate The Uyghur Khaganate (also Uyghur Empire or Uighur Khaganate, self defined as Toquz-Oghuz country; , Tang-era names, with modern Hanyu Pinyin: or ) was a Turkic empire that existed for about a century between the mid 8th and 9th centuries. It ...

, in

Mongolia Mongolia is a landlocked country in East Asia, bordered by Russia to the north and China to the south and southeast. It covers an area of , with a population of 3.5 million, making it the world's List of countries and dependencies by po ...

. The

stele A stele ( ) or stela ( )The plural in English is sometimes stelai ( ) based on direct transliteration of the Greek, sometimes stelae or stelæ ( ) based on the inflection of Greek nouns in Latin, and sometimes anglicized to steles ( ) or stela ...

bearing the inscription is believed to have been erected during the reign of the eighth Uighur ruler,

Baoyi Qaghan Baoyi Qaghan, or Alp Bilge Qaghan, was the eighth ruler of Uyghurs. His personal name is not known; therefore, he is often referred to by his Tang dynasty invested title, Baoyi (), which was invested on 22 June 808. Reign He was known as a zeal ...

(r. 808-21 CE). Written in

Old Uyghur Old Uyghur () was a Turkic language spoken in Qocho from the 9th–14th centuries as well as in Gansu. History Old Uyghur evolved from Old Turkic, a Siberian Turkic language, after the Uyghur Khaganate broke up and remnants of it migrated ...

, Sogdian, and

Chinese Chinese may refer to: * Something related to China * Chinese people, people identified with China, through nationality, citizenship, and/or ethnicity **Han Chinese, East Asian ethnic group native to China. **'' Zhonghua minzu'', the supra-ethnic ...

, the inscription marks the qaghan’s military accomplishments and those of his predecessors, as well as their adoption and support of the

Manichean Manichaeism (; in ; ) is an endangered former major world religion currently only practiced in China around Cao'an,R. van den Broek, Wouter J. Hanegraaff ''Gnosis and Hermeticism from Antiquity to Modern Times''. SUNY Press, 1998 p. 37 found ...

religion. ''

Encyclopædia Iranica ''Encyclopædia Iranica'' is a project whose goal is to create a comprehensive and authoritative English-language encyclopedia about the history, culture, and civilization of Iranian peoples from prehistory to modern times. Scope The ''Encyc ...

'' describes it as "one of the most important sources for the history of the Uighur Steppe Empire (744-840 CE) and the study of Manicheism in

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. With population of China, a population exceeding 1.4 billion, it is the list of countries by population (United Nations), second-most populous country after ...

and

Central Asia Central Asia is a region of Asia consisting of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. The countries as a group are also colloquially referred to as the "-stans" as all have names ending with the Persian language, Pers ...

", citing the fact that many of the historical events recorded in the inscription are only known from it. The fragments of the inscription were first discovered by the Russian explorer

Nikolai Yadrintsev Nikolai Mikhailovich Yadrintsev (; October 18, 1842, Omsk – June 7, 1894, Barnaul) was a Russian public figure, explorer, archaeologist, and Turkologist. His discoveries include the Orkhon script, Genghis Khan's capital, Karakorum and O ...

in 1889.

Context

The first line of the stele, which is copied in the shield-shaped tablet on top, names the qaghan to whom it was dedicated: This ruler was the eighth qaghan of the empire, and the inscription was established either during his reign or shortly after his death in 821 CE. The wording of the first lines seem to indicate close parallel between the Sogdian and the Old Uyghur versions, from which the Chinese is independent.

References

{{Turkic inscriptions Uyghur Khaganate Chinese inscriptions Uyghur inscriptions Sogdian language 9th-century inscriptions Multilingual texts