A whole province that only wrote its graves

Claim (verbatim)

The Old Turkic runiform script is famous for the imperial monuments of the Orkhon, but a second and larger epigraphic province used the same alphabet very differently: the Yenisei basin, where over a hundred inscriptions cluster — and almost every one is a funerary text, a dead man speaking in the first person of the kin, khan, and pleasures he has left. There are essentially no Yenisei decrees, letters, accounts, or annals. The mechanism is a medium-and-genre lock: a literate warrior aristocracy that could cut a fluent first-person eulogy in stone plainly commanded writing for the living too, but wrote it on wood, bark, and other perishables that the Yenisei ground did not keep, so an entire region's writing survives filtered down to the one genre that demanded permanence. The Yenisei corpus is thus a proof that epigraphic survival is genre-selective within a single literate culture: the same hands that carved these stones must have kept tallies and sent orders we will never see. Prediction: in a complete census of the Yenisei runiform corpus, funerary and memorial inscriptions will exceed 90% of items, with administrative, epistolary, and legal texts at or near zero, and this genre monoculture will be sharper in the Yenisei than in the Orkhon-and-imperial group of the same script (primary clause: the over-90% funerary share in the Yenisei corpus; a non-trivial Yenisei documentary or administrative class falsifies it). Kill: I. V. Kormushin's editions of the Yenisei Old Turkic inscriptions and D. D. Vasil'ev, Korpus tyurkskikh runicheskikh pamyatnikov basseyna Eniseya (1983), cross-checked against the TURIK BITIG / Bitig Old Turkic inscription database.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: in a complete census of the Yenisei runiform corpus, funerary and memorial inscriptions will exceed 90% of items, with administrative, epistolary, and legal texts at or near zero, and this genre monoculture will be sharper in the Yenisei than in the Orkhon-and-imperial group of the same script (primary clause: the over-90% funerary share in the Yenisei corpus; a non-trivial Yenisei documentary or administrative class falsifies it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: I. V. Kormushin's editions of the Yenisei Old Turkic inscriptions and D. D. Vasil'ev, Korpus tyurkskikh runicheskikh pamyatnikov basseyna Eniseya (1983), cross-checked against the TURIK BITIG / Bitig Old Turkic inscription database.

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

The Yenisei runiform corpus is described in every edition and handbook - Kormushin's Yenisei epitaph volumes, Vasil'ev's Korpus, Erdal's Grammar of Old Turkic - as almost exclusively funerary and memorial, first-person eulogies of the dead, with essentially no decrees, letters, or accounts. The over-90% funerary share the primary clause predicts is therefore already the stated character of the corpus, and its contrast with the decree-and-narrative-bearing Orkhon/imperial group is equally standard. The answer is in print, not awaiting a fresh census.

• I. V. Kormushin, Tjurkskie enisejskie epitafii (Moscow: Nauka, 1997)
• D. D. Vasil'ev, Korpus tyurkskikh runicheskikh pamyatnikov basseyna Eniseya (Leningrad: Nauka, 1983)
• Marcel Erdal, A Grammar of Old Turkic (Leiden: Brill, 2004)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.