The Ancient Turkic Inscriptions Of Literary Studies

"Old Turkic Inscriptions" refer to the official or private inscriptions in the Runiform script in the territory of the second Turk Khanate (552-745 )and Uyghur Khanate (745-840 ) which were established during the 6 - 9th century in the northern part of China.After the discovery of these inscriptions, Turcologists from various countries tried to decipher the language and construct the text. Studies on the diverse aspects of Old Turkic inscriptions such as the editing texts, linguistic features, history, religion, folklore and culture have been done. But there are a few studies on the literary aspects of these texts. This paper first focuses on whether the inscriptions can be called literary texts on the whole when examining the literary traits and the value of various Old Turkic inscriptions. Indeed, the distribution of Old Turkic inscriptions is quite intricate and there are obvious differences on their length, subject structure as well as plot respectively.When studying the Old Turkic inscriptions from literary perspective, it's the most important step to select the text with unique artistic style, namely the text with original beauty decided by aesthetic consciousness of specific historical period. Among the voluminous texts of Old Turkic inscriptions, this article has chosen the texts of "Tonyukuk", "Kül Tigin" and "Bilg(a|¨) Kaghan" inscriptions which were constructed in the Orkhon valley during the second Turk Khanate as research samples. Based on this, it has probed into the literary implication of Old Turkic inscriptions.This thesis aims at to carry on a comprehensive explanation towards the three Old Turkic texts mentioned above and has further analyzed their literary characteristics and origins.This thesis consists of three chapters with introduction, conclusion and the appendix.In introduction I give some general introduction to the Old Turkic inscriptions, the significance of this study, bibliographical details, the analysis and comment towards present research situation of inscriptions, the research methods and text designation, the origin of the text and list of Latin alphabets which are used for transcription; It has also made some definition and simple explanation regarding academic concept and the terminology used in this article. In Appendix, I rearrange the three inscriptions on the basis of literary aspects of the texts. In chapter one, I generalize the literary aspects of theses texts on the basis of the cultural and historical origin and analyzing the characters in this text. Using the method of literary text criticism, this paper penetrates again three texts arranged by several scholars, attempts to examine the author's original intention, and embarks from the social context of inscriptions texts to draw up the texts suitable for the literary research. Finally, for better understanding of the structure of these texts and for further study I will give brief introduction to the content of the texts.Chapter Two covers the literary genre of ancient Turkic inscriptions. This chapter carries on theoretical criticism and practical conclusion of varied literary genre over three texts on a basis of literary genre standpoint, sketches the primitive literary genre of ancient Turkic inscriptions and collisions, collections as well as the mutual blending relations among diverse ancient literary genres. Thus it ventures to grasp the essence of ancient literary thoughts of various ancient Turkic tribes, and relations between the folk oral literature and the inscribed text literature. Moreover, there are some arguments concerning the genre of various Old Turkic inscriptions whether they are prose or poetry. This chapter observes the three texts from literary art perspective. And I consider that the various Old Turkic inscriptions are prose not poesy.Chapter Three deals with narrative art of the Old Turkic inscriptions. This chapter, by narrating viewpoints, characters and plots, has further unearthed artistic structural frame of literary connotation of three inscribed texts, including cultural origin as well as many details in expressions. In other words, this article discourses upon in specific analysis the narration skills of three texts, and also discusses the relations between the authors of these texts and characters, the function of authors and narrator . Thus, this thesis has not only concerned the narrative pattern, the skill, the characterization, the plot of three texts, but also determines the identity of authors of "Kül Tigin" and "Bilg(a|¨) Kaghan" inscriptions.In conclusion I attempt to explain whether the Old Turkic inscriptions are literary texts or purely historical ones using the method of new historical criticism. Although according to the viewpoints of new historical principle, they essentially belong to the literature-oriented, literature-theoretical and narrative historical texts, rather than scientific and analyzable ones.Therefore, when we study the formation and development of these texts, we should observe the historical development of literature and culture. Finally, I made conclusion that the Old Turkic inscriptions are literary work in some respects. I hope this thesis will help the further study on the artistic value of these texts. And I believe that this value exists in the literature and also in history.