2007-05-12
[Mirrored from http://babelstone.blogspot.com/2007/05/phags-pa-graffiti.html]
The Caves of the Thousand Buddhas 千佛洞 near the ancient Silk Road town of Dunhuang 敦煌 are world famous for their beautiful Buddhist murals, dating from the 4th through the 14th centuries. And like many such places, visitors over the centuries have taken delight in defacing them with senseless graffiti in many scripts and languages :
Chinese and Tangut graffiti in Dunhuang Cave 63
Source : Les grottes de Touen-Houang vol.6 p.97
In the above image can be seen inscriptions in Chinese dated Daoguang 5 [1825] (on the left) and Qianlong 26 [1761] (in the middle), as well as a Tangut inscription (on the right) dated the 18th year of [...].
What interests me most of all is an inscription in Cave 70 in the Phags-pa script :
Phags-pa Inscription in Dunhuang Cave 70
Source : Les grottes de Touen-Houang vol.6 p.99
This cave is believed to date to the early High Tang (circa 725), so the Phags-pa inscription cannot be original (the script was not invented until the mid 13th century). Indeed it is very roughly inscribed onto the face of the mural, and is evidentally an example of 13th or 14th century graffiti. The inscription itself is very clear, and reads mėn bu yėn qa yė ꡏꡦꡋ ꡎꡟ ꡗꡦꡋ ꡢ ꡗꡦ :
Unfortunately I am having difficulty understanding what it means because this is definitely neither Chinese nor Mongolian, the two main languages which were written using the Phags-pa script during the Yuan dynasty. The use of U+A866 PHAGS-PA LETTER EE for the /e/ vowel is typical of Uighur Phags-pa usage, and so my suspicion is that the language of this inscription is Old Uighur. This is very exciting as there are very few examples of Uighur written in the Phags-pa script. However, as I have no working knowledge of the Old Uighur language and no dictionaries or grammars to help me out, I am not getting very far in translating it. Nevertheless, with a little help from internet dictionaries of modern Uighur I can attempt a guess at the meaning of the first three Phags-pa syllables :
I can't find a corresponding modern Uighur word for the final qa yė ꡢ ꡗꡦ, but perhaps the intent of the inscription is something along the lines of "This is me!", referring to the picture of the man to the left of the inscription (which I cannot locate within the images of the murals of Cave 70 in Les grottes de Touen-Houang Plates CXVIII, CXIX, CXX, CXXI, CXXII, CXXIII, CXXIV and CXXV).
Any better suggestions as to the meaning of this inscription will be most gratefully received.
I have just discovered James Hamilton's Manuscrits ouïgours du IXè-Xè siècle de Touen-Houang (Paris, 1986), which provides annotated translations of Uighur manuscripts from Dunhuang as well as a very useful glossary. I haven't read through it all yet (Christmas reading perhaps), but the glossary (page 231) has given me one suggestion :
buyan, PWY'N, PWYN (1.7′). Forme correspondant au skr. puṇya «mérite religieux, acte de mérite, bonne action».
So if Phags-pa bu yėn equals Old Uighur buyan, we have "I [...] an act of merit", where Phags-pa qa yė is presumably an appropriate verb ("did", "promise to do", etc.). This would seem to make quite a bit of sense in its context—a Uighur benefactor records their benevolence on the wall of the cave where they had performed an act of merit, or as an indelible reminder that they had promised to perform such an act. But still the meaning of qa yė eludes me.