The Uyghur Stone: Archaeological Revelations in the Mongol Empire

2021

The article discusses the insights gained from an Old Uyghur register that sheds light on the administrative structures of the Mongol Empire. The study provides a detailed description of the manuscript, including its surviving contents, and an English translation of the text. The article presents the historical context, suggesting that the manuscript was a register of a postal station. It also discusses the significance of the manuscript for understanding the history and functioning of the Mongolian imperial administration.

International Journal of Asian Studies, 2009

Historical scholarship on the Uyghurs often focuses on the imperial ambitions of the states that surrounded Chinese Central Asia and the political intrigue that surrounded the emissaries of those states. Instead of asking how Uyghurs themselves imagined their community, these studies focus on relations of conquest and resistance and the gravity of wealth and power. Of course, the colonial domination of the Uyghurs is an important part of their history, but it is not the beginning of their story. Drawing on an ethnography of oral traditions and an extensive archive of sacred texts from shrines across the Uyghur homeland, Rian Thum's work seeks to amplify how Uyghurs themselves imagined their community prior to the state, prior to modernity, perhaps even prior to Islam. 1 In essence, Thum is arguing that the identifications of the Uyghurs are not centered around a national imaginary or ethnic community, but rather it was articulated through the oral recitation and amendment of sacred texts during pilgrimages to the shrines of the " bringers of Islam " (wali). Since the arrival of Islam in the tenth century (and perhaps even before this), the telling of the stories of mythic heroism and morality tales have functioned as a kind of collective memory that, in turn, has constituted, what I refer to below, as an " indigenous sovereignty " made up of social ties to land and to a constellation of people. In Thum's telling of this story, a lifeworld appears without being explicitly labeled as Islamic. He argues that the Turkic people that today have come to be identified as Uyghurs in fact have a complex history of attachment to land and to faith. The texts that were recited and amended during shrine pilgrimages served as founding myths that rooted people in place, much as centralized Islamic political, legal and religious formal institutions shaped contemporaneous Islamic societies elsewhere. The geographic and political isolation of the Turkic population of Chinese Central Asia coupled with pre-Islamic animist knowledge systems allowed shrines to function as informal institutional opportunities for popular participation in communal authorship. Thum argues that this performative aspect of Uyghur Islamic cultural life led to a powerful fixing of meaning to points in space (123). Sacred spaces and the practices associated with them thus tied people to the earth and to each other in profound ways. Through this, an element of timelessness was built into places in the landscape of the desert. Places themselves became sacred, not merely sites of first encounter with a new religious system. This place-edness made the production of history extremely intimate. Through this process history was made and the personal was bound to the earth; the past came to be understood as imminent in the present. In practice, the shaykhs who tell the stories of the heroes of the past, and the pilgrims who listen and question their telling, came to understand themselves as conduits of sacred history.

The Mongol World. Edited by Timothy May and Michael Hope, 2022

Drawing upon research carried out in several different languages and across a variety of disciplines, The Mongol World documents how Mongol rule shaped the trajectory of Eurasian history from Central Europe to the Korean Peninsula, from the thirteenth century to the ffteenth century. Contributing authors consider how intercontinental environmental, economic, and intellectual trends affected the Empire as a whole and, where appropriate, situate regional political, social, and religious shifts within the context of the broader Mongol Empire. Issues pertaining to the Mongols and their role within the societies that they conquered therefore take precedence over the historical narratives of those societies. Alongside the formation, conquests, administration, and political structure of the Mongol Empire, the second section examines archaeology and art history, family and royal households, science and exploration, and religion, which provides greater insight into the social history of the Empire-an aspect often neglected by traditional dynastic and political histories. With 58 chapters written by both senior and early-career scholars, the volume is an essential resource for all students and scholars who study the Mongol Empire from its origins to its disintegration and legacy.

Choice Reviews Online, 2015

Journal of Asian Studies, 2009

International Journal of Asian Studies, 2009

НҮҮДЭЛЧИД БА ХОТ СУУРИН, 2020

In 2005 Judith Kolbas published a remarkable interpretation of the Uyghur site Tsagaan Sumiĭn Balgas, Khotont sum, Arkhangaĭ aĭmag, situated in a valley on the northern slope of the Khangaĭ mountain range north of a small creek which finally enters north of Karabalgasun into the Orkhon River. The dating and its implication for urbanism in Mongolia are discussed.

2020