SOME THOUGHTS ON THE OLD UIGHUR DOCUMENT U 5933 (CONTRIBUTIONS TO MORIYASU 2019)

There were private letters among the Uighur manuscripts in the Thousand Buddha Caves in Dunhuang. It is seen that these letters have different contents from daily human relations to working life, from commerce to state administration. There are more than two hundred letters belonging to the Old Uighurs from different times. This study consists of presenting a document which is only given the text and translation of it in the doctoral thesis I have prepared on the Old Uighur letters and their vocabulary, and announcing updated information and comments about the document. The document mentioned, read and interpreted in this study is a letter and it is preserved in the Turfan Collection of the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften as U 5933 (T M 84 = COUL no. 172). This document was first examined by P. Zieme in 1975 and later by J. Wilkens in 2000. Finally, this document was discussed in T. Moriyasu’s Corpus, which brought together Old Uighur private letters in 2019. Considering the view that Moriyasu expresses as “I cannot understand the reason why Zieme and Wilkens regard it as a writing by a Manichaean”, some justifications defending this view are suggested here. In addition, some new reading and interpretation suggestions are made regarding this document.