Written Monuments of the Orient

The present article deals with an Oirat letter, which was sent from Gаldаntsеrеn (1694–1745) to the Eastern Mongol nobleman Tseren (1672–1750) in 1737 during the border-line negotiation between the Dzungar Empire (1671–1755) and the Qing Dynasty (1644–1912). The letter is examined from two aspects. The first compares the original Oirat letter and its Manchu translation of that time, attempting to find distinctions in the content or sentences. The second is to analyse the Oirat letter’s colloquial elements and speech act. Academics generally agree that the precise sound marking capability of the Oirat script makes it easier for components of that time’s spoken language to infiltrate into the written form.

This article presents a Russian translation, commentary and brief textual research of the Tangut manuscript (10th–13th cc.) describing a tantric practice possibly related to the doctrine of “Six Yogas” of the famous Indian tantric master Nāropa. Since the handwriting of this manuscript is nearly illegible, I have published here only part of this text which is more or less comprehensible due to its general meaning and structural completeness. Considering that this research aimed at the identification of the original specific traits of Tangut Buddhism which make it distinct from the neighboring Buddhist traditions that had, in their time, had a strong impact on its formation is a most important trend in this field, the publishing of this textual source could be helpful in this context.

The large Turkic epic Danishmendname, which tells us a story about the conquests of Danishmendid dynasty in Asia Minor in the 11th c., retained its popularity in the Ottoman empire up until its collapse. At the same time, current public discourses in modern Turkey reveal the new wave of popularity of warrior epics about the legendary Turkic conquerors. Despite the Danishmendname has been fruitful topic of research, by and large, there are generally comprehensive historical, literary and linguistic commentaries to the manuscripts and its published facsimiles. Recent studies on the topic, though, address the Danishmendname in a broader context of Late Medieval frontier epics as an informed source for cultural and political environment of that milieu. Following this latter approach, we assume that Danishmendname constitutes an excellent case study for investigation of cultural memory of Muslim conquests in Asia Minor for several reasons. This epic not only records multiple layers of complex Muslim-Christian interactions in Anatolia, including the accounts of the First Crusade, but also could shed light on the way the lay people, who transmitted the lore, assigned meaning to the world in which they lived. This world, being very unstable with its flexible identities and no tangible allegiances, was imagined as a ‘house of war’ (dār al-ḥarb), where any means of Islamization were tolerable. So, the Muslim conquerors build/ rebuild mosques in newly captured cities, demolish and desacralize the Christian places of worship (so do their Christian counterparts with the mosques), and even perform a miracle to convince ‘infidels’ to convert to Islam. Similar supernatural deeds of Christian monks, however, are perceived as a sorcery, thus, being desacralized. Given the context, the category of ‘sacred’ becomes observable wherever group identities are challenged and put at stake. Thus, by means of discourse analysis, this paper explores how this certain category was manifested both spatially and spiritually in the scope of the ‘holy war’, which is in the center of the plot.

January 2025 marks the 145th birthday of Professor Sergey Yefimovich Malov (1880–1957), Corresponding Member of the USSR Academy of Sciences, a renowned expert in ancient Turkic runic and Uighur texts, history, language, and culture of Turkic-speaking peoples, as well as an outstanding educator in the field of Turkology. His early academic biography and classical legacy are associated with two famous research expeditions to Western China (1909–1911 and 1913–1915). In addition, 110 years have passed since the end of his Turkestan expedition and 104 years since his planned third trip to Central China. The scholarly expedition of S.E. Malov is organically woven into the history of Russian and foreign academic and humanities research and discoveries in the important geopolitical and historico-cultural space of Central Asia in the late 19th — early decades of the 20th cc. This article presents a part of the epistolary legacy of S.E. Malov: four letters written to his teacher Academician V.V. Radlov during two periods of Malov’s research journey to Qing China (1910–1915) as well as the last, fifth, letter from Kazan dated January 17, 1917. These letters belong to the Academician’s personal collection kept at the St. Petersburg Branch of the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Fund 177, Inventory 2, File 161). The letters, originally written in Russian, are given in the article in English translation.