Two Alliterative Uighur Poems from Dunhuang

Abstract

A total of 246 Dunhuang manuscripts (including a few fragments from Turfan) preserved in Beijing University Library were published as an independent volume of the facsimile series 敦煌吐魯番文献集成 Dun-huang Tu-lu-fan wen-xian ji-cheng 'The Corpus of Dunhuang-Turfan Manuscripts'. In this volume, are excellent photographs of some Khotanese, Tangut, Tibetan and Uighur texts together with a large number of Chinese manuscripts. Two fragmentary Uighur poems which are the subject of this paper originally were published in facsimile in the second volume of this facsimile edition. In this paper these two Uighur fragments (signature numbers : 北大 D 154V=Text A and 北大 附 C 29V=Text B) were provided in transliteration, transcription and translation along with philological explanations as well as some analysis on their content, structure, orthography and language. Text A was identified as the praise of Sulayman Wang (速来蛮 Su-lai-man or 搠魯蛮 Shuo-lu-man) who is the descendant of Hülägü Khan's son Yoshmut and later became the Ilkkhan and ruled until 1343. According to the details of this text the author prefers to consider this fragment as the secular text instead of Buddhist poetry. The orthography and content tell us this poetry very possibly was written after Sulayman was appointed as Xi-ning Wang (西寧王) in the third year of 天歴 Tianli (1330). Text B was given under title 佛経 Fo-jing 'Buddhist sūtra' in the facsimile edition. This is the fragment of an alliterative poetry, and from the preserved part we assume that it is very possibly a fragment of a Buddhist confession poetry. It was become that clear that the first four lines of this fragment overlap the last four lines of Ch/U 7503 preserved in Berlin (BT XIII 17) and probably these two fragments belong to the same text.