Friday, April 17, 2015

Khöshöö Tsaidam / Хөшөө Цайдам

Khashaat's Ruins Evoke Ancient Memories


Exterior of the museum, with Japanese visitors
Khöshöö Tsaidam (Mongolian, Хөшөө Цайдам) - the nearly 1300-yea-old remains of a steppe empire - is the most famous place in Khashaat sum. However, it's far from the village part of Khashaat, hence it requires a special trip. I never ran into it just going about my business. I paid it a visit it last year on April 11, and although I'm a little late (April 17) now, in this blog's current spirit of "This Day in [the] History [of My Time in Mongolia]," let's look at Khöshöö Tsaidam, one of the archaeological treasures of Mongolia.

Poster in my school. It reads, "The Turkic-era memorial complex at Khöshöö Tsaidam, and several artifacts."
Khöshöö Tsaidam is also admired outside Khashaat: This poster is from a series of posters of famous Mongolian places that covered the walls of a classroom in Tsetserleg.

Bilge Khan and the Göktürk Empire


Modern Turkish is the best known of the Turkic languages, but it was spread to the land now called Turkey by invasion from Central Asia. There are many other Turkic languages spoken Central and Northern Asia, and in fact, the Turks may have originated in Western Mongolia near the Altai Mountains. While China was ruled by the Tang Dynasty, most of the lands to its north were part of the Second Turkic Khaganate. This vast nomadic conglomerate was led by the Göktürks or "Blue Turks" (Mongolian: Хөх Түрэг / Höh Türeg), and in the 8th century the Blue Turks were led by Bilge Khagan (Билэг хаан, 683? - 734 A.D.), with the help of his brother and military commander, Kultegin (Көлтэгин / Культегин / Күлтэгин, died 731).

In addition to accomplishing many things politically and militarily, Bilge Khan liked to boast about his accomplishments. To this end, he erected two stele in the valley of the Orkhon river. The stele describe his and his brother's achievements in a bilingual inscription in Orkhon runes and Chinese characters. Those runes (together with a few other inscriptions from the same time) are the oldest writing in any Turkic language.

Билгэ хааны тахилын онгон - "Bilge Khan's sacrificial idol"
How Bilge Khan's monument would have looked in the 8th century

The Turkic Empire soon crumbled, and its monuments were also left to crumble for hundreds of years. The site of these ruins became known in the Mongolian language as Хөшөө Цайдам (variously transliterated as Khöshöö Tsaidam, Khushuu Tsaidam, or Koshu Tsaidam). In the 19th century they were found by Russian explorers, and translated by the Danish linguist Vilhelm Thomsen. Along with other remains of ancient kingdoms scattered along the Orkhon river, Khöshöö Tsaidam was inscribed in UNESCO's world heritage list in 2004 as part of the "Orkhon Valley Cultural Landscape" (Орхон хөндийн соёлын дурсгал) [1]. The museum was established in 2011 - just weeks after I arrived in Mongolia (although I didn't know it yet!) [2]

Headless stone men?

Bilge Khan's crown

The Museum


April 11, 2014 fell during the Mongolian secondary school's spring break, and I was at site, with nothing to do. When my JICA friends from Kharhorin told me they were going to visit Khöshöö Tsaidam and Ögii Lake and asked if I wanted to come, off I went.

When I was invited to Mongolia by Peace Corps and read about archaeological finds in Mongolia, I orignally imagined some broad lonely field with decayed stone brushed by the wind. I wondered whether I should bring tracing paper to make my own rubbings, as past archaeologists have done. I soon realized I had a fat chance of actually touching them - the ruins are in a museum now, of course.

Хар бэхээр зурсан зураг бүхий дээврийн ваар - black ink-drawing on a roof tile

The museum features many small artifacts from that time period, but the centerpiece, of course, is the inscribed steles. Orkhon writing is often referred to as "runes" due to its resemblance to the runes used by the Germanic peoples (and Tolkien's dwarves!), but they arose independently of each other. The sharp, narrow character of Orkhon runes is due to their use in decorating steles like Bilge Khan's. Cutting stone is hard and it's much easier to make straight lines. Around the world, stone-carved scripts tend to be angular and brush-written scripts tend to be curvier. That is not as interesting though, as the fact that apparently Orkhon were sometimes read from the bottom up [3].


One of Bilge Khan's monuments

Having seen them in person, I realize Khöshöö Tsaidam had been interesting to me long before I even knew what it was. When I was a child and beginning to be interested in language, I read an old, fat book about the history of writing around the world. Although I did not remember the name "Khöshöö Tsaidam," I remembered "Orkhon Turkish runes" and a page with a facsimile of them. How strange to think that now I was living next to something I had remembered from a book years ago.

Narrow, angular "runes" on the face of the stela

I took photos of the entire surface of the stele shown above in case I ever had the chance, and knowledge, to interpret it, but it turned out I didn't need to. Passing a tiny merchandise stand on our way out, I saw the book shown below, Хөх Түрүгийн Бичиг by Д. Баатар. The book featured a complete transcription, transliteration, and translation (into Mongolian) of the steles. This being a museum gift shop, it cost almost $30 ... but the book was right there right then and I didn't know if I would ever see it again, so ... of course I bought it!



Read more on this blog about the word хөшөө in the next Mongolian Word of the Week!

More Reading


Notes

  1. See UNESCO's site for the Orkhon Valley Cultural Landscape at http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1081.
  2. June 27th, 2011, according to the news article "Хөшөө цайдам музейн нээлт боллоо" at http://www.mecs.gov.mn/mod/print/index.php?id=635 (in Mongolian).
  3. This odd writing direction (unique as far as I know of the world's languages) is mentioned on the Omniglot page (http://www.omniglot.com/writing/orkhon.htm). However, from reading my book on the inscriptions - Хөх Түрүгийн Бичиг (The Göktürk Script) by D. Baatar, it seems clear that Bilge Khan's inscription at least does not work this way.