The Final Part of the Mongol Text of the 1413 Tyr Trilingual Inscription A New Decipherment

Abstract

This is the last of a series of papers presenting a new approach to reading the Preclassical Mongol inscription on the 1413 Tyr stele, now at the Vladimir K. Arseniev Museum of Far Eastern History (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. The first three parts of the Mongol inscription have already been discussed in previous publications, where some of the lacunae in the Mongol text of lines two to twelve were successfully filled in through comparison with the corresponding better-preserved parts of the Jurchen text, in combination with a more careful investigation of all the existing photos and rubbings of the inscription. In the present article the same new approach is extended to the final part of the Mongol text, consisting of lines thirteen to fifteen.