Актуальные вопросы тюркологических исследований

535 Actual Problems of Turkic Studies difficult. In some areas we cannot be sure whether the language underlying the inscriptions is Turkic at all, and even if so, what kind of Turkic. This is the case e.g. with the inscriptions of the Avar and Khazar Empires of Europe (for a comprehensive classification of the Eurasian runiform inscriptions and a discussion of elementary problems) [18]. While the sharp minds of experienced scholars have produced invaluable studies with outstanding results in the field, the possibilities of data processing and computer technologies have not yet been explored sufficiently. A clear ad-vantage of the online databases is accessibility: The knowledge on the Turkic inscriptions is scattered throughout innumerable publications, some of which are difficult to access. For example, a critical reading of the literature reveals that some researchers dealing with the Yenisei inscriptions obviously did not have direct access to the so called Finnish Atlas (Société Finlandaise d’Archeologie 1889), a remarkable documentation of thirty-two inscriptions which surpasses in quality many of the later studies although it was published even before the deci-pherment of the Turkic runiform script. As a consequence, it can be observed that new publications occasionally fall back behind a state of research already achieved fifty or a hundred years earlier. An online database offers access to anybody and enables documentation of the state of research with the possibility to add new data, update the findings and correct errors. Collaboration of scholars across long distances becomes also very easy. A well- designed database offers completely new perspectives for the structuring and browsing of data. The cata-loguing of glyphs and their allographic relationship as well as of signs with un-known value together with their geographical distribution, the documentation of secure readings and identification of unreadable or controversial passages, the identification of textual parallels, generating the grapheme inventories of indi-vidual inscriptions, an updatable list of references interlinked to the inscriptions to which they are relevant, and other features can support researchers in settling many problems related to the runiform inscriptions simply by providing the ex-isting data in a structured and searchable way. The Database of Turkic Runiform Inscriptions was established at the University of Mainz in January 2015 as a start-up project funded by university sources. The first stage of the project aimed at designing an online platform with the necessary software components and installing a test version of the database. At this stage it was decided to concentrate on a group of inscriptions of a manageable scale, which on the one hand contains solid and processable material and on the other offers hitherto unsolved problems so that all the designed and implemented features of the platformbecome testable.The Yenisei inscriptions were found to be such a corpus. During the subsequent period,