Old Turkic Monuments of Runic Writing from Eastern Turkestan

In 1896 the Russian Geographic Society handed over to the Asiatic Museum (IOM RAS) a sack of shreds of ancient manuscripts collected in Turfan oasis by the 1893–95 expedition of V. I. Roborovsky and P. K. Kozlov. The manuscript fragments from a Buddhist cave monastery near Toyuq-Mazar and from the ruins of Idiqutshari were initially sorted out by A. O. Ivanovsky and S. F. Oldenburg; afterwards, in December 1897, they were examined by V. V. Radloff, who picked out four Old Uighur fragments from the collection. Pointing out that the fragments were too small to identify, V. V. Radloff nevertheless was able to classify them into two categories: documents in scarcely legible cursive writing and Buddhist sutras in calligraphic writing.