Актуальные вопросы тюркологических исследований

Актуальные вопросы тюркологических исследований 536 we have tested the software environment, designed the website and added the necessary internal components (templates, property definitions and further source code for the complete functionality). At the same time, more than five hundred publications relevant for the Yenisei inscriptions were collected, digitalized and converted into searchable files by means of OCR software tools. These materials constitute the scholarly basis for the selected group of inscriptions to be entered into the database. Then, the actual research started, during which the first inscriptions were scrutinized in the light of the existing references, an as accurate as possible reading of the inscriptions was established and opaque passages were identified. A test version of the database containing a limited number of inscriptions was launched in June 2015 (cf. http://www. runiform.uni-mainz.de ). It is being gradually enhanced and improved and shall ultimately contain all the Turkic runiform inscriptions on which data are available. A concise description of the structure and functionality offered by the database is given below. The article is structured as follows: First, a rough survey of the state of re- search on Turkic runiform inscriptions is given and some problems are ad- dressed. Available online databases related to the field will also be presented shortly. Then, the Mainz database will be described from technical and struc- tural points of view. Lastly the future perspectives will be summarized. In the appendix the description page of an inscription (Begre, E-11) will be given as example. State of the art As it is impossible to give a full account of the state of research on Turkic runi-form inscriptions within the present framework, only a very rough survey will be provided here, and only a few key studies mentioned. A detailed survey on runiform inscriptions of Turkic and unknown prove- nance in Eurasia is given by Tryjarski [18] who also addresses unsettled prob- lems and research desiderata. A very comprehensive bibliography on Turkic runiform inscriptions is Aydın [1]. Among the key works on the Orkhon inscriptions are Radloff [11], which contains, besides photographs, drawings andmaps, also squeezes of inscriptions, as well as Orkun [8], Malov [6] and Berta [3]. The latter studies represent differ- ent stages of knowledge regarding the reading of the inscriptions. For the Yeni- sei inscriptions, an important early work is the Finnish Atlas (Société Finlan- daise d’Archeologie 1889), which offers typeset texts of thirty-two inscriptions, squeezes of some inscriptions as well as a grapheme inventory. Radloff [11] provides photographs, both retouched and unretouched, of several Yenisei in- scriptions, which are helpful for the identification of some signs that cannot