В. Г. Гузев. Избранное

490 В. Г. Гузев. Избранное: К 80-летию where the Sogdian language and writing functioned as the official language (the Bughut inscription of 582). 2. The adoption of italic Sogdian writing and adaptation to the Turkic lan- guage with its subsequent use both in official and religious texts (a number of Sogdian-Turkic documents) 1 . Later (in the 8th-9th cc.) this way led to the formation of the so called. Old Uighur script. 3. The invention of a “native” script on the basis of the already extant store of pictorial means. This way was realized under the conditions of a strong pressing from the side of two writing systems — the hieroglyphic (Chinese) and alphabetic (Sogdian) one — that were well known by the Turks and used by them 2 . From a note of Chinese dynastic chronicles con- cerning the existence by the Turks in the 6th century of two types of writ- ing, one of which was like that of the people hu (i.e. Sogdians) and the other — signs on wooden sticks (small planks) used for fiscal purposes, one can conclude that in the First Qaghanat alongside with the Sogdian script there was already a functionally limited non-italic one — so called “rezy” (notches, “Kerbschrift”). It is not unreasonable to assume that a script of that kind was one of the early prototypes of the OTRS. The existence of such prototypes may be concluded from non-canonical runic inscriptions found in Altai, at the Upper Yenisei, in Eastern Türkistan and in Yetysui. The further development, of these variants of the writing later was reflected by the Eastern-European (Xazaro-Bulgarian) runic script, the latter being represented by a number of variants in the Eurasian steppe zone between the Volga and Danube. It is difficult to say anything definite as regards the lowest (old) time threshold when the Turks got the first variants of their script. Judjing from the inscriptions on the silver cup out of the Issyq barrow near Alma-Ata (the 4th century B. C.) and the runiform variant of the inscription on the tringual stela from the Dast-i Navur (Afghanistan, near Ghazni, the beginning of the I millennium A. D.) some runiform writing systems had been used already by the historical predecessors of the Turks — by the Iranian-speaking nomads of the Central Asia. Undeveloped pictorial and runiform script might have been used during a long historical period under the conditions of primarily limited space for the function of writing. This was possible even at the earliest stages of the formation of the Turkish-speaking unions. 1 A. Gabain von, Alttürkische Grammatik... 2. verbesserte Auflage, Leipzig, 1950. P. 28–31. §10. 2 About political, cultural and other contacts of the Old Turks see: С. Г. Кляшторный, Древнетюркские рунические памятники как источник по истории Средней Азии. М., 1964. Р. 78–135.