The Mongol Text of the Tyr Trilingual Inscription (1413): Some New Readings and Interpretations

Abstract

This paper presents a new approach to reading the Preclassical Mongol inscription on the 1413 Tyr stele, now kept at Primorye State Museum named after V. K. Arsenyev (Vladivostok, Russia). The stele contains texts carved in three languages: Chinese, Jurchen, and Mongol. The Jurchen and Mongol texts are very close to each other in content, as well as in the grammatical structure of words and sentences. For this reason, some missing and previously illegible parts of the Mongol text can be reconstructed and read on the basis of the Jurchen version. Lines 2 and 3 of the Mongol inscription have already been discussed earlier in a separate publication. In the present paper, the same approach, combined with a careful investigation of all the existing photos and rubbings of the inscription, is extended to lines 4 to 9.1