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An Old Uigur medical fragment in Syriac script

Summary

This paper re-edits M 152, a single folio held by the Museum of Asian Art in Berlin. It is an Old Uigur medical text written in Syriac script and the only medical item among the Old Uigur writings of the Church of the East. Zieme (2015) published the rest of that corpus but left this piece out. Before this paper it existed only in a Turkish edition by Ölmez (1999).

Károly first describes the object. It uses a landscape pothi format, which is rare for Syriac books, has six lines per side, and probably dates to the 13th–14th century (Late Old Uigur). He also characterises its distinctive script variant. He then provides a transliteration, transcription, English translation, line-by-line commentary and glossary.

The surviving recipes group ulcers (kart) by their origin. The word lešp "phlegm", one of the Ayurvedic doṣas, links the content to the Indian medicine of Buddhist Uigurs. Other Christian Turfan fragments instead reflect the Greek tradition. The author suggests that converts kept secular practices such as healing from their non-Christian kin.

Key points

  • The fragment measures 6×20.5 cm and was found in Kocho during the first German Turfan Expedition (1902). Comparison with the Manichaean pothi U 95 (6×21.8 cm) suggests about 1 cm is lost, mostly on the right side.
  • The script variant is unusual. The lāmadh-ālaph ligature is sometimes written as a crossed X, and ālaph appears in both Estrangela and Serta shapes. Vowel pointing is used sporadically, with ʾassaqa for /i/ and zlama qašya for /e/.
  • The text is structured visually. Full stops and horizontal colons close syntactic units, wider blank spaces separate recipes, and ordinals such as tokuzınč "ninth" and ekinti "second" number the sections.
  • Knüppel (2013) catalogues 65 Old Uigur medical texts held in Germany. These include 13 from Siddhasāra, 9 from Aṣṭāṅgahṛdayasaṃhitā, 5 from Yogaśataka, and 32 of unknown origin.
  • At Bulayïk the Christian finds include roughly 450 Syriac texts, 550 Sogdian texts in Syriac script, 50 Sogdian texts in Sogdian script, and only about 50 Old Uigur texts.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. The edition keeps four separate layers (letter-by-letter transliteration, normalised transcription, translation, commentary), so each interpretive step can be checked against the raw evidence. — For Mova (tokens): Store the surface string, normalised form and lemma as distinct linked layers, so any morphological decision can be traced back to the exact input characters.
  • I2. The author notices one word written twice in a row with different spellings (öŋi öŋi) and treats both spellings as the same lexeme. — For Mova (tokens): Collect such adjacent-variant pairs as evidence for spelling-variant tables that map nonstandard forms to a single lemma.
  • I3. A case ending is rejected because an intransitive verb (öŋäd-) cannot take an accusative object, and attested locative or dative patterns are offered as the plausible alternatives. — For Mova (frames): Use VerbNet valency to flag arguments a verb class cannot license, then propose the role-compatible reading as a repair candidate.
  • I4. Damaged or obscure passages are restored by analogy with parallel phrases attested elsewhere in the same fragment or genre (bilgülük bolsar, yaglıg aš). — For Mova (learn): Derive repair rules from near-identical attested constructions in the corpus, and accept a rule only when a matching parallel exists.
  • I5. A single diagnostic term (lešp, one of the three doṣas) is enough to assign the text to a knowledge tradition, against the default expectation for its religious community. — For Mova (world): Let strong domain-marker words select which ontology slice or frame set to activate, rather than relying on genre or source metadata.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.33063/os.v73.525

@inproceedings{karoly2024old,
  title = {{An Old Uigur medical fragment in Syriac script}},
  author = {Károly, László},
  booktitle = {Orientalia Suecana 73},
  year = {2024},
  doi = {10.33063/os.v73.525},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.33063/os.v73.525}
}

References

50 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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  50. Zieme, Peter 2015. Altuigurische Texte der Kirche des Ostens aus Zentralasien. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press (Gorgias Eastern Christian studies, 41). Facsimiles The following images of fragment M 152 are based on the digital photos from the Depositum der Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften in der Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin - Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Orientabteilung. The originals are available in the Digital Turfan Archive 20 and in the International Dunhuang Project: Die Seidenstraße online. 21 *Figure 1: M 152 recto* *Figure 2: M 152 verso* 20 See the Depositum der Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften In der Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preussischer Kulturbesitz Orientabteilung at https://turfan.bbaw.de/dta/m/dta_m_index.htm. 21 See the German IDP website at http://idp.bbaw.de. High quality digital photos of the fragment are available at http://idp.bbaw.de/database/oo_loader.a4d?pm=M 152. Glossary amru “continuously” v3 aš “food” r3, r3 ašan- “take food, eat” r3 atlıg “named” v4 [at]lıg r5 kim “who” r2, v6 [k]im r6 kiši “female, woman” v3 kol “arm” r6 kolu “measure, quantity” r1, r2 äm “remedy, medicine” v5 köz “eye” r5 ämlä- “cure, treat” v1 kün “day” v5 bagl “wounded” r4 lešp “phlegm” [leš]p v4 baš “head” v2 ber- “give” v5 bil- “know” r4, v6 bir “one” r1, r2 bo “this” r5, r6, v2, v5 bol- “be, become” r4, v3 bulagu “?” v4 bu[lagu] r4 [b]ulagu v3 buš- “gasp, breathe heavily” [b]uš- v4 čiš- “become swollen” v6 ekinti “second” v6 em “remedy, medicine” v2 er- “be” v2 et “meat, flesh” r5 etöz “body” v6 gäyik “deer” r5 ig “disease” v2 iglig “sick, ill” v5 kart “ulcer” r1, r1, r5, r6, v1, v2, v4 katuruk “?” r3 keräk “necessary, must” kerä[k] v1 [kerä]k v5 kın- “long for” r5 ol “that” r1, r5, v1 o[l] r1 oŋ “right” v3 ögsüz “unconscious” r2 öŋäd- “recover, get better” r5, v2, v5 [öŋ]äd- r2 öŋi öŋi “various” r4 sarıg “bile” r1, r5 siŋ- “be digested” r3 tagara “musk larkspur (Delphinium brunoni-anum)” r5 terk “fast, rapidly” v5 tın “breath” v4 tilän- “wish, seek for” v3 tokuzınč “ninth” r2 tözlüg “originating in” r1, r5, v4 üč “three” v5 ün- “rise, grow” r6, v5 yaglıg “fatty” [ya]glıg r3 yämä “also, too” r6 yeglä- “become sick” r4 yenŋnüli “light (?)” v3 yetür- “feed, give to eat” r1, r5 yiglig “sick, ill” r5 ↗

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