What happened to the wolf’s mouth? A new interpretation of Divination No. 27 of the Irk Bitig

Abstract

The Irk Bitig is a 9th-century ancient Turkic divination book written in runic script, discovered by Aurel Stein during the exploration of the Cave of the Thousand Buddhas in Dunhuang in 1907. This small book contains 65 divinations and a colophon, the first reading and translation of which was published in 1912 by the Danish Turkologist Vilhelm Thomsen. In each case, the text of the divination briefly describes a situation, a genre picture or a story, followed by a short sentence about whether the omen is good or bad.

Since the first edition of the Irk Bitig, several scholars have worked on the analysis of the text, primarily from a linguistic point of view. Some of the short stories in the omens are clear and easy to understand, but there are also many that are grammatically or semantically rather problematic.

The meaning of the 27th omen is relatively clear and easy to analyse. In the translations so far, controversy has arisen over the precise meaning of only one word. Some translators have interpreted the Old Turkic verb ämsi- as a simulative form of the verb äm- ‘to suck / suckle’, but in fact there are no other examples of such a deverbal verb formative. Although the linguistically verifiable verb ämsi- ‘to cure / medicate’, derived from the noun äm ‘medicine’, has already been raised in previous scholarship as a possibility, it was rejected as semantically unacceptable and incompatible with the text.

In this article, I offer a new interpretation of the omen, and show that the previous interpretations were based on the premise that in the case of the sheep and the wolf, good and evil could only be manifested in the opposition of “good sheep ‒ bad wolf”, which was in fact induced by the cultural background of the interpreters and which may not be taken for granted in the case of the Old Turks.