Yollug Tigin repeats himself

Claim (verbatim)

The earliest named author of Turkic literature, Yollug Tigin, signed both great Orkhon steles — Kul Tigin (erected 732) and Bilge Khagan (735) — and built the second largely out of the first: the dynastic narrative in Bilge Khagan's voice, from Bumin and Ishtemi onward, recurs near-verbatim, edited where the dedicatee differs. The claim: royal memory on the steppe was a template genre — each stele an instance of a chancery master-text rather than a fresh composition — so the reuse should be massive, block-shaped, and confined to the shared dynastic matter, with fresh prose reserved for what only the later stele must say. Prediction: aligning the transliterated texts, at least one-third of the Bilge Khagan inscription will duplicate Kul Tigin verbatim or near-verbatim (at most one divergent word per line), and the non-duplicated remainder will concentrate in the narrative of events after Kul Tigin's death in 731 and in the funerary sections (primary clause: the one-third verbatim share; the verdict follows it). Kill: the parallel texts and apparatus in Tekin's A Grammar of Orkhon Turkic (1968), with Thomsen's Inscriptions de l'Orkhon dechiffrees (1896, public domain) and the facsimiles in Radloff's Atlas der Alterthuemer der Mongolei.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: aligning the transliterated texts, at least one-third of the Bilge Khagan inscription will duplicate Kul Tigin verbatim or near-verbatim (at most one divergent word per line), and the non-duplicated remainder will concentrate in the narrative of events after Kul Tigin's death in 731 and in the funerary sections (primary clause: the one-third verbatim share; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the parallel texts and apparatus in Tekin's A Grammar of Orkhon Turkic (1968), with Thomsen's Inscriptions de l'Orkhon dechiffrees (1896, public domain) and the facsimiles in Radloff's Atlas der Alterthuemer der Mongolei.

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

The near-verbatim duplication of Kul Tigin's dynastic narrative in the Bilge Khagan inscription — with fresh matter confined to events after 731 and the funerary sections — has been mapped in the editions since Thomsen, and Tekin's edition presents the parallel passages; that many parts of the two inscriptions are the same is a textbook statement. The one-third share is arithmetic over an alignment already published as apparatus.

• V. Thomsen, Inscriptions de l'Orkhon dechiffrees (Memoires de la Societe Finno-Ougrienne 5, 1896)
• T. Tekin, A Grammar of Orkhon Turkic (Indiana University, Uralic and Altaic Series 69, 1968)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.