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''Irk Bitig'' or ''Irq Bitig'' (Old Turkic: ), known as the Book of Omens or Book of Divination in English, is a 9th-century manuscript book on divination that was discovered in the "Library Cave" of the Mogao Caves in Dunhuang, China, by Aurel Stein in 1907, and is now in the collection of the British Library in London, England. The book is written in Old Turkic using the Old Turkic script (also known as "Orkhon" or "Turkic runes"); it is the only known complete manuscript text written in the Old Turkic script. It is also an important source for early Turkic mythology. == British Library manuscript == The only extant version of the ''Irk Bitig'' is a manuscript from the Dunhuang Library Cave that is now held at the British Museum (shelfmark ). The manuscript is in the form of a booklet comprising 58 folios folded in half, each page being about 13.1 × 8.1 cm in size. The pages of the booklet turn to the right (opposite to that of Western books), and the Old Turkic text is laid out in horizontal right-to-left lines running top-to-bottom down the page. The text of ''Irk Bitig'' consists of 104 pages in 52 folios (folios 5b–57a), with 40–70 characters per page. The text is written in black ink with red punctuation marks marking word division, except for the colophon on the last two pages, which is written in red ink. The first four and a half folios (including one line overwriting the start of the Old Turkic text) and the last three folios (of which one and a half folios overwrite the Old Turkic colophon) are Buddhist devotional verses written in Chinese. As the Chinese text overwrites the beginning and end of the Old Turkic text, it is believed that the text of ''Irk Bitig'' was written first, and that the blank pages at the start and end of the booklet were later filled with the Chinese Buddhist verses.〔 The title by which the book is known, ''Irk Bitig'', meaning "Book of Omens", is given at the bottom of the last page of the main text (folio 55b), but the author is not mentioned anywhere.〔 The manuscript text is not precisely dated, but its colophon states that it was written on the 15th day of the second month of the year of the tiger at the Taygüntan () Manichaean monastery by an anonymous monk for his "elder brother", General İtaçuk (Saŋun İtaçuk).〔 As the Library Cave was sealed in the early 11th century, it is thought that this year of the tiger must be sometime during the 9th or 10th centuries. Louis Bazin suggests that the year of the tiger could here be 930 or 942, but Gerard Clauson and Talat Tekin both date the manuscript to the 9th century (i.e. one of the years 810, 822, 834, 846, 858, 870, 882 or 894). A number of transcription errors and textual omissions have been identified in the manuscript text, which suggest that it is not an original composition but a copy of an earlier text that was probably written in the Old Uyghur script. On the basis of its linguistic features, Marcel Erdal has dated the composition of the original work to the 8th and 9th centuries, among the earliest group of Old Turkic texts.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Irk Bitig」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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