The oldest monuments of Turkic languages—inscribed on stones, and datable to the early 8th century ce—were discovered in the late 19th century in southern Siberia around the Yenisey River and in northern Mongolia near the capital of Urga (modern Ulaanbaatar). Deciphered in 1893 by the Danish scholar Vilhelm Thomsen, they provide valuable insights into the history of Central Asia around the 7th century ce. These records of the Turk dynasty (Chinese Tujue) comprise especially texts found at Kosho-Tsaidam on the Orhon (Orkhon) Gol (river), including also Chinese text. These texts throw light on the nomadic culture of the tribal empire controlled by the Turk dynasty, including shamanism, calendar, customs, and social structure, with strong Chinese influence detectable in the latter.
After the decline of the Turk people (c. 745), their successors, the Uighurs, perpetuated for a time the same kind of monumental dynastic epigraphy, the writing system of which is an offshoot of the Aramaic alphabet, presumably mediated by the Iranian-speaking Sogdians of Central Asia. Gradually, however, new scripts took over (especially the so-called Uighur alphabet, of Syriac origin, which was further transmitted to the Mongols and the Manchus) and inscriptional monuments gave way to manuscript records such as those found in Chinese Turkistan (Turfan) in the late 19th century (along with texts in Sanskrit, Sogdian, Tocharian, and other Indo-European idioms), attesting to a coexistence of Buddhist, Manichaean, and Nestorian Christian religious communities. The later Turkish peoples, including the Anatolian Seljuqs and Ottomans, had an Islamic book-tradition, to which the inscriptional record is merely incidental.
Northern Europe
The advent of writing was slow north of the Alps; it came either from direct expansionary exportation by Greek coastal colonies and the Roman Empire, as in Gaul and the Iberian Peninsula, or indirect inspiration from the same quarter, as in writing in the Irish and British ogham alphabet and the Germanic runes.
Celt-Iberian inscriptions from Spain and Celtic ones from Gaul and Ireland are scarce, mostly brief, and notably devoid of usable historical information, apart from their mere monumental existence and linguistic and onomastic (pertaining to names) content. Occasional items such as the fragmentary Gaulish Calendar of Coligny afford insights into local cultural practices, apart from an overwhelming trend to romanization.
The runic alphabet—a Germanic alphabet, originally of 24 letters, also called futhark—and its offshoots (the Scandinavian, especially Danish, 16-letter variety from the 9th century ce; and Anglo-Saxon versions, from the 3rd to the 10th centuries ce, also called futhorc) are probably of “North Etruscan” or “Sub-Alpine” Italic inspiration, datable to about 200 bce. The “North Italic” letters of the Germanic text harixasti teiva, “to the god Harigast,” on a helmet from Negau (southern Austria) are probably from that time of transmission. Runic inscriptions from the era of migrations, ranging from eastern France through Germany up to Denmark and eastward via Poland to Romania, are supplemented by the later, richer yield from England and Scandinavia. Native Anglo-Saxon runic epigraphy, mostly in Northumbria, Mercia, and Kent, petered out around the 10th century, whereas the Scandinavian tradition (including its enclaves on British soil) endured for several more centuries. Sweden has some 3,000 runic monuments; Norway and Denmark, perhaps 400 each; while Iceland has remarkably few, apparently in inverse proportion to the literary flowering in that colonial outpost. The Vikings left their runic calling cards in far-flung places, including those in the Greek port of Piraeus, on the Black Sea coast, in Varangian Russia, in Scotland, Ireland, and the Isle of Man, and the Orkneys, Hebrides, and Shetland islands; Greenland also has its share. A noteworthy North American example is the Kensington Stone found in Minnesota—telling of the westward trek of an exploration party from Vinland—though some scholars consider it to be a forgery.
The purposes of runic inscriptions were usually either dedicatory or commemorative, sometimes magic, and frequently sepulchral. The longest, that from Rök in Sweden (725 runes), seems to contain a catalog of epic deeds, possibly those of the Ostrogoth king Theoderic. The prime historical value of runic epigraphs is usually what and where they are, rather than what they depict or record.
Inscriptions as social and cultural records
In the preceding section, inscriptions were evaluated as sources for the presence and migrations of peoples, the existence and chronology of political states, their dynastic histories, foreign relations, internal governance, legal institutions, and official acts. In this section, epigraphy is surveyed for information about how past civilizations lived; their religious beliefs and practices; their business, financial, legal, and social relations; and what shape their aspirations assumed in terms of verbal creativity. The subdivision of civilizations surveyed differs somewhat arbitrarily from the earlier section by the omission of certain areas and the inclusion of Crete and Mycenaean Greece. In fact, Indic and Chinese epigraphic matter discussed above could just as well have fitted the “religious” slot, but its royal character and chronological importance for official history dictated otherwise. Conversely, the Cretan and Mycenaean tablets are purely economic inventories, but they might possibly have been included with history above for the very important historical fact that they prove the ruling presence of Greeks at Knossos during the 2nd millennium bce. The varying degree of importance of epigraphic material in various cultures persists: in Mesopotamia and the ancient Middle East its dominance was nearly total; in Egypt it combined with the papyrological dimension; in Crete it was merely a flash in a prehistoric darkness; while in ancient Greece and Rome, it was a supplementary concomitant of the nonepigraphic literary tradition.
Ancient Mesopotamia
Ample specimens of Akkadian-language clay-tablet epistolography have been found at several sites, notably Tell el-Amarna in Egypt and Tell al-Ḥarīrī on the middle Euphrates (the ancient Mari of c. 1700 bce). The Amarna letters, about 400 of them, were composed in corrupt Akkadian by Canaanite scribes in Syria and Palestine and were largely official in character. The Mari letters, some 5,000 in number, are more illustrative of normal day-to-day written communication in a Mesopotamian milieu proper.
Another aspect of everyday life in ancient Mesopotamia is amply illustrated by thousands of clay tablets of a practical legal nature, as distinct from the formal laws. These archivally preserved records from various periods use Sumerian, Old Akkadian, Babylonian, and Assyrian alike. They detail law suits, court decisions, marriage contracts, divorce proceedings and settlements, sale adoptions (fictitious acts circumventing prohibitions against land sales outside the family), loan agreements, tax receipts, and much else. Commercial inventories, such as those of the Old Assyrian merchant colony at Karum Kanes in central Asia Minor (20th century bce), complete the picture.
Due to the religious sanction of law, legal records were often stockpiled in temple archives. These latter are also the source of more directly cultic texts, such as descriptions of rituals, which come under such headings as “Temple Program for the New Year’s Festivals at Babylon,” “Ritual to be Followed by the Kalū (priest) when Covering the Temple Kettle-Drum,” “Ritual for the Repair of a Temple,” and “Program of the Pageant of the Statue of the God Anu at Uruk.” Prayers, lamentations, and hymns in both Sumerian and Akkadian are extant, addressed to deities such as the goddess Ishtar, the moon god Sin, the sun god Shamash, the great triad Anu, Enlil, and Ea, and the Babylonian patron god Marduk. The Sumerian “Lament for the Destruction of Ur” bemoans the city’s fall to Elamites and Subarians. Often the king himself is the spokesman in the text. Wisdom literature, such as proverbs and fables (e.g., “Dispute between the Date Palm and the Tamarisk”), poetic meditations, oracles, divination records, omens, and prophecies are further examples of Mesopotamian genres that only epigraphy has preserved.
Sumerian and Akkadian narrative literature is likewise of wholly inscriptional transmission. It contains humanity’s earliest preserved literary creations in the Sumerian sequence, especially the texts from tablets found at Nippur. These include the “Paradise myth” of the god Enki and the goddess Ninhursag in the pure, clean, and bright land of Dilmun; the story of Dumuzi and Enkimdu (the petulant shepherd god versus the peace-loving farmer god, inversely reminiscent of the Cain–Abel antagonism in Genesis but not culminating in murder); “The Deluge” with its Noah-hero Ziusudra; “Inanna’s Descent to the Nether World,” which prefigures the later Akkadian “Ishtar’s Descent”; and the lays of Gilgamesh, which show the Sumerian traditions that were later partly organized and transformed into the Akkadian epic. The latter include “Gilgamesh and Agga of Kish,” a story of confrontation between early Sumerian city-states; “Gilgamesh and the Land of the Living”; and “The Death of Gilgamesh,” with its haunting parallelistic refrain “he lies, he rises not.”
The Akkadian Epic of Gilgamesh is divided into 12 tablets, the longest of which is more than 300 lines; this “Flood Tablet” (the 11th) is virtually intact and comes, like almost all Assyrian-language Gilgamesh texts, from the library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh (7th century bce). From the 2nd millennium there are fragments of a Hittite version from Boǧazköy, as well as minor traces of a Hurrian translation. Old Babylonian correspondences to tablets 1–3 and 10 are found on a tablet from Sippar (c. 1800 bce). The 12th tablet is a literal translation from Sumerian, whereas the rest amounts to a self-contained Akkadian epic original, based on Sumerian motifs but with a thrust of its own. The most complete reconstruction involves a combination of Assyrian, Old Babylonian, and Hittite versions.
The other famous Mesopotamian epic, Enuma elish, “When on high,” details the story of cosmic creation and of how Marduk became the great god of Babylon; it had more immediate cultic attachments because its recitation formed part of the New Year festival.
Further Akkadian literary creation is attested in the epic of Atrahasis, a tale of humanity’s punishment through pestilence and flood, preserved in fragmentary Old Babylonian and Assyrian versions. The story of Adapa, found in parts in the Tell el-Amarna archives and the library of Ashurbanipal, is similar to Gilgamesh’s quest for immortality. The myth of Zu deals with the theft of the tables of fate and the usurpation of almightiness by the bird god Zu. The legend of Etana, a namesake of the shepherd-king who ascended to heaven in the mythical postdiluvian Sumerian dynasty of Kish, recounts in its Old Babylonian and Assyrian recensions the heavenly flight of Etana on the wings of an eagle in order to acquire the magic birth plant that would cure his childlessness. Death-oriented themes appear in the tale of Ishtar’s descent, in the story of Nergal and Ereshkigal, and in various netherworld texts associated with the Tammuz myth and liturgy.