Content area
Full Text
Books of the Mongolian Nomads: More than Eight Centuries of Writing Mongolian. By GYÖRGY KARA. Bloomington: Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies, Indiana University, 2005. 371 pp. $58.00 (cloth).
This volume began life as a translation by John Krueger of the author's Knigi mongol'skix kochevnikov (1972, Moscow: Nauka), but it is in fact far more than that. Taking advantage of the more than thirty years of research that has intervened since the publication of the Russian version, Kara has greatly expanded his treatment of numerous topics, added several more plates and other illustrations, and organized the references into a Western-style bibliography. The new bibliography itself is a thorough guide to Mongolian philology.
The book is an ambitious study of Mongolian writing and books throughout Mongolian history. The initial chapter, dealing with the Tabgach language of the T'o-pa Wei dynasty (388-550) and the large and small Kitan scripts of the Liao empire (907-1125), is the section of the book that is the most fully expanded since the Russian version. Our knowledge of the Kitan script, while still fragmentary, has grown enormously in the past thirty years, and the author is now in a position to discuss the progress and remaining problems in considerably more depth. The Kitan small script, which has proved more amenable to study, is a combination of logographic and syllabic elements that definitely...