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Age of Radloff in Turkish Studies

Dimitriy VASILIYEV

Professor of Department of Oriental History,

Institute of Oriental Studies of Russian Academy of Sciences,

Correspondent Member of Turkish Language Association

The last quarter of the nineteenth century was of utmost significance for the history of Turkish studies. Turcology was developed during this period as a separate discipline to study the past and present of the language, literature, and material, intellectual, and spiritual products of Turkish peoples. Through a sustained prolific effort, a group of distinguished scholars focused their attention on the amazing Kök Türk monuments discovered in the basins of the Orkhon and the Yenisei rivers and in East Turkistan. The creator and the forerunner of this flourishing age in Turkish studies was W. Radloff (1837-1918) who had maintained his leadership throughout his life.

Friederich Wilhelm (Vasili Vasilyevich) Radloff was born on 5 Janurary 1837 in Berlin. His fa ther was a police officer at the municipality. During his gymnasium years he distinguished himself with a talent in classical languages. At seventeen he started studying at Berlin University, department of philosophy. Later on he developed an interest in oriental studies, comparative linguistics, and ethno-geography. His Ph.D. thesis entitled "The Impact of Religion on Asian Peoples" was an embodiment of this interest and was awarded by Jena University.

The influence of theories developed by his various professors such as August Pott, comparative linguist Franz Bopp, creator of comparative Ural-Altai Language theory Wilhelm Schott, expert on ethno-psychology Hermann Steintal, and orientalist and geographer Karl Ritter, was visible in this first academic work of Radloff. Radloff started studying the grammar of Mongolian, Manchurian and Tatar languages and learned his Russian before completing his university studies.

Upon the advice of Prof. Schott, Radloff decided to dedicate his life to the practical study of Eastern languages by actually living in the Asian part of Russia. Before moving to Asia, he was engaged to his future wife Pauline Fromm who was a school teacher. Pauline encouraged Radloff in his endeavour through her letters sent to the distant regions in the Altai Mountains and accompanied and supported her husband during his travels in adverse conditions.

Radloff went to St. Petersburg in 1858 to apply to the Russian Geography Society to be included in the excursion to the Amur River Basin in the Far East to do a research on the Tungus peoples. But the Ministry of Public Education suggested him going to the Barnaul region to teach German and Latin at the School of Metallurgy. The young scholar agreed by stipulating for scholarships to be approved for five years during his summer excursions in the Altai region.

It took Radloff almost a month and a half to arrive at Barnaul.the city was situated in the vicinity of a large area of coal deposits. Many schools were openned for the training of technical staff. The chairman of the Mining Department, the most notable official in the local government, was very happy with the new schoolteacher and commended him for his pleasing character and enthusiasm in his official report. Young Radloff accompanied the Chairman in his excursions to Kuznetsk and to the mountainous Shor region. It was during these excursions for ethnographic research that he witnessed, for the first time in this life, the way a Siberian shaman worshipped.

Radloff collected a considerable amount of material on Turkish languages, Central Asian and Siberian ethnology, geography and archeology between 1858-1871 in the Altai region. He studied Turcology on his own there and acquired experience through his contacts with peoples living in the Altai, Tuva, West Siberia, and Yenisei regions. This accumulation of knowledge was later to become a comparative dictionary of the Turkish language and a collection of examples from an oral poetic tradition.

Radloff used to start off for three or four month excursions at the beginning of each summer. From 1866 on, he published samples of folk literature, linguistic notes, and travel books on ethno-geography. His immense experience in field study paved the way for Radloff's future excursion to the Orkhon Monuments. Lack of equipment and financial means were compensated by Radloff's enthusiasm, discipline, and endurance to hardships.

Radloff distinguished himself in the world of science with his published works and gained immense experience through his practical studies in Turkish peoples during his stay in the Altai region. In view of his achievement, the Ministry of Public Education appointed him to a new post in 1871 as an inspector for the Tatar, Bashkurt, and Kazakh schools in Kazan, a university town. In Kazan, Radloff reviewed and interpreted the previously collected data. While teaching at a school, he prepared his comprehensive books to be published in several volumes. Following the first publication of his Proben (Examples from the Folk Literature of Turkish Tribes), the first comparative phonetics of Turkish languages, and his travel book on his excursions in the Altai period, Aus Sibirien (From Siberia), he was elected to the Russian Academy of Sciences from the Department of History of Asian Peoples.

Radloff moved to St. Petersburg in 1884, and that marked the beginning of a new area in the development of Turcology. For many Turcologists, there are "Pre-Radlof" and " Post-Radloff" periods in Turkish studies.

Between 1891 and 1911, Radloff focused his studies on the runic inscriptions on the Kök Türk Monuments. The first albums he prepared contained archeological material supplemented by other written sources to be found in the archives on the old culture of Siberian peoples. He published four albums entitled "Historical Works in Siberia." He gradually developed an intense interest in Turcology and focused on the material cultural monuments of Turkish peoples. The publication of his works on the Siberia of the Kök Türk period was received with excitement by the archaeologists in Siberia. N.M. Yadrintsev, N.M. Martyanov, and D.A. Klements sent him pictures of Kök Türk monuments and especially of the inscriptions on them.

Radloff organised the Mongolian excursion in 1891 to see all the known inscriptions on their site, to discover new ones and to introduce them to a wide circle of experts. He prepared a preliminary report on the results of t his excursion immediately after he returned. The experience he acquired in the Altai region in field study helped him in completing his excursion in a short time. His Atlas der Alterhümer dei Mongolei (Atlas of Historical W orks in Mongolia), which contained descriptions and pictures of many inscriptions and monuments in the Orkhon and Yenisei valleys (monuments erected in honour of Kül Tigin, Bilga Kagan, and Tonyukuk, Ongin Monument, Ashete I and Ashete II monuments and a series of inscriptions found in Yenisei) began to be published in 1892. The data collected by the Orkhon excursion formed a basis of the atlas.

Efforts were underway to decipher and interpret this rich material. Finally Danish scholar Vilhelm Ludwig Thomsen succeeded in this endeavor and announced it on 15 December,1893, with a report presented to the Danish Royal Academy of Sciences. Radloff, who was in contact with Thomsen, received a letter from him dated November1893 to learn that Thomsen had deciphered the Kök Türk inscriptions and identified the letters of the runic alphabet. Within a month Radloff presented a translation of the inscriptions on the monument erected in 732 to perpetuate the life and heroic exploits of Kül Tigin, son of a Kök Türk Khan, to the academy. The Russian Academy of Sciences decided to publish and send this highly valuable work to scholars and scientific associations. Radloff sent a copy to Thomsen and received his compliments in a letter that reads: "As for the interpretation and translation of the inscriptions, I regret not being Radloff."

This achievement was followed by a three-volume "Kök Türk Inscriptions in Mongolia," which included an interpretation and explanation of the letters of the runic alphabet, transcription and translation of the inscriptions on the monuments erected in honour of Kül Tigin and Bilga Khan, a glossary, addenda, and index to the glossary, corrections of the previously published texts, a list of combinations of runic letters, material on the morphology of Kök Türk dialect, new translations of Kosho-Tsaydam inscriptions and addenda to the word text of the Kök Türk inscriptions.

A new edition of Die Alttürkischen Inschriften der Mongolei (Old Turkish Inscriptions in Mongolia) appeared in 1897 and the second edition in 1899. The new edition comprised notes on the phonetics, morphology and syntax of the Kök Türk language, the recent reading of the Kül Tigin and Bilga Khan inscriptions, and corrections of and addenda to other inscriptions and addenda to the other inscriptions. The second edition, on the other hand, was completely dedicated to the inscription on the monument erected in honour of Tonyukuk.

These first Turkish translations have been the beginning of a new area to open doors to the Early and Middle period of the Turkish history. The history of almost two centuries of the Turkish empire was written on the stone monuments erected near the tombs of heroes and khans and the graves of soldiers and shepherds. This history was full of exciting events that shed light on the lives of the various nomadic tribes. The empire had apparently had a significant role in Eurasia. Kök Türks had developed economic and diplomatic relations with China, Tibet, Korea, India, Sogd, Harezm, Siberia, and Byzantium. The Turkish tribes in the region where the Yenisei Kyrghyz lived, which was a part of the Turkish empire, had been cultivating the land and had developed an irrigation system. Sayan and Altai Mountains were importand trade routes which enabled Kök Türks to establish long term trade relations with other cities in East Turkistan. The inscriptions also reflected the spiritual and social lives of these nomadic tribes and provided information on the gods, the world outlook, and the structure of the empire which had a well-developed state organization and a tribal hierarchy. This was a new opportunity for a better interpretation of the military and political events in the history.

The convergence of the scientific interests of many talented scholars prepared the way for Radloff's success. A group of archeological researchers under the leadership of D. A. Klements discovered various monuments in the Upper Yenisei Basin. In his works and letters Radloff had always advised hsi colleagues a comparative approach to the material on Turkish peoples. Accumulation of immense encyclopaedic information by Radloff on various branches of Turcology and his amazing energy were the principal agents in the birth of this new discipline and its methodology. His methodology was to become a theoretical foundation for several generations of scholars. Radloff acquired a valuable practical experience in the comparative study of monuments as the curator of the Asian Museum between 1885 and 1890 and of the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology. This experience illuminated the path for later scholars such as P.M. Melioranski, H.N. Orkun, and S.E. Malov, who translated and published Kök Türk inscriptions and enabled them to further their studies.

Radloff's works, which started a new age in Kök Türk runology, have still maintaned their value as the classical heritage widely used by the Turcologists of our day. (Most probably because there isn't much more to find and learn! :P) His "Atlas of Historical Works in Mongolia" has long been a classic. Time did not spare the Orkhon and Yenisei inscriptions and many pieces of inscriptions copied by Radloff have been destroyed and eroded since then. (...)

Most of the material collected by Radloff and his manuscripts have been preserved at the Moscow State History Museum and the archives of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg. A list of W. Radloff archives has been prepared by the famous Turcologist A.N. Samoylovich in 1918. Master copies of the Kök Türk inscriptions, first published in the present book (Orkhon) after Radloff's publications, have been preserved at the Russian Academy of Sciences. Radloff's letters have separately been preserved at the archives in Hungary, Denmark, and Germany. His negatives on glass, taken during his excursions, have been at the Institute of Material Cultural History in Petersburg. I myself have discovered some archive material in the local museums in Irkutsk and Minusinsk regions. The largest collections of Kök Türk monuments have been at museums in Minusinsk, Kyzyl and Abakan in the Russian Federation and some are at museums in Moscow, Petersburg, Krasnoyarsk, Novosibirsk, and GornoAltaisk.

Many sources can be found on various stages in the life and studies of W. Radloff. K.G. Zaleman, V.V. Barthold, A.N. Samoylovich, V.A. Gordlevski, Ahmet Temir, B. Munkacı, A.H. Kononov are among writers who have written his biography. A complete list of the works on Radloff's life and books is to be found in the "Collection of Turcology," published in 1972 by the publishing-house Nauka in Moscow.

It has been a hundred years since W. Radloff published the Orkhon inscriptions. The Radloff Atlas has become an antique. It has long been a pressing need for the Turcologists to look at the Kosho-Tsaydam, Ongin, and Ashete inscriptions the way Radloff did. This new edition of the selected material from the four-volume Radloff Atlas aims to serve this purpose. International museum laws stipulate for the printing of the copies to check the original designs, etchings and matrixes every fifty years. Besides the pictures in the Radloff Atlas, we had to take photocopies for checking purposes from the mastercopies of the Kül Tigin, Bilga Kagan, and Tonyukuk monuments, drawn by Radloff and preserved at the Manuscript Treasury of St. Petersburg Branch of the Institute of Oriental Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences, for the first time in a century. Prof. S.G. Klastorniy helped us in photocopying them. The subtitles of the pictures are taken from the original atlas of Radloff.

As duly pointed out by S. E. Malov, Radloff's student and one of the celebrated Turcologists of the first half of this century, studies in runic Kök Türk monuments, which constitute the basis of all studies on Turkish languages, give the new generations of Turcologists an opportunity to find and identify undiscovered elements in these texts. But this opportunity by no means diminishes the contributions of scholars who had laid the foundations in their times.

We hope that the publication of the pictures and the new photocopies of the Radloff Atlas will provide the contemporary Turcologists with a fresh opportunity to materialize the will of the scholar, and will be an expression of our respects and gratitudes for the valuable contributions of Radloff.