Sale deeds, loans, leases, slave sales, wills and tax lists from Turfan, Qocho and Beshbaliq, the only internal evidence for everyday life, land tenure, prices and officials in the Uyghur kingdom whose idiqut was a vassal of the Qara Khitai in 1200. Few can be dated to 1200 itself, since they use twelve-year animal cycles, but the earlier group shows the kingdom's Buddhist landowners, monasteries and local officers as they were before the submission to Chinggis Khan in 1209. Religious texts from the same finds show the Buddhist, Manichaean and Christian communities.
About this source
- Title
- Old Uyghur civil documents from Turfan and the Qocho kingdom
- Author
- Various
- Written
- mostly thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, with some earlier; dated by animal years and rarely to a reign
- Language
- Old Uyghur (Uyghur script), with some Chinese and Sogdian
- Covers
- the Uyghur kingdom of Qocho under the idiquts and later under the Mongols, roughly 1000 to 1400
- Kind
- Charters and cartularies
Yamada's corpus is under copyright and not free online. Digital images of the Berlin Turfan collection and of some Uyghur documents exist in the Berlin and International Dunhuang Project databases, but no link could be verified within this task. Dating individual contracts to 1200 is not possible; treat the corpus as a description of the kingdom rather than a dated record.
Where to read it
Editions
- N. Yamada, Sammlung uigurischer Kontrakte, ed. J. Oda, P. Zieme, H. Umemura and T. Moriyasu, 3 vols (Osaka, 1993), Uyghur texts with Japanese and German translation (not freely online)
- W. Radloff and S. Malov, Uigurische Sprachdenkmäler (Leningrad, 1928) (not freely online)