Talas Inscriptions: Some Corrections in Identification of Runiform Letters (On the Example of the Second Inscription)

Abstract

Although the Turkic runic inscriptions found in the Talas region of today'sKyrgyzstan have been known since the end of the 19th century, many of them havestill not been deciphered reliably. This is in part due to subjective reasons such as theshortness of the texts, but often due to their poor-quality copies and rubbings whichusually led to misidentification of the letters.In this article the author dwell on the second Talas inscription, which is the mostvoluminous of the corpus. Based on a new rubbing and de visu examination of themonument the author aims to identify all the runiform letters as accurately as possible.The author also intends to correct the mistakes made in previous publications.