[690] Crooke, op. cit. IV. p. 221.
[691] The Tribes and Castes of Bengal, 1892; The People of India, 1908.
[692] Discovered in 1889 by N. M. Yadrintseff in the Orkhon valley, which drains to the Selenga affluent of Lake Baikal. The inscriptions, one in Chinese and three in Turki, cover the four sides of a monument erected by a Chinese emperor to the memory of Kyul-teghin, brother of the then reigning Turki Khan Bilga (Mogilan). In the same historical district, where stand the ruins of Karakoram—long the centre of Turki and later of Mongol power—other inscribed monuments have also been found, all apparently in the same Turki language and script, but quite distinct from the glyptic rock carvings of the Upper Yenisei river, Siberia. The chief workers in this field were the Finnish archaeologists, J. R. Aspelin, A. Snellman and Axel O. Heikel, the results of whose labours are collected in the Inscriptions de l'Jénisséi recueillies et publiées par la Société Finlandaise d'Archéologie, Helsingfors, 1889; and Inscriptions de l'Orkhon, etc., Helsingfors, 1892.
[693] "La source d'où est tirée l'origine de l'alphabet turc, sinon immédiatement, du moins par intermédiaire, c'est la forme de l'alphabet sémitique qu'on appelle araméenne" (Inscriptions de l'Orkhon déchiffrées, Helsingfors, 1894).
[694] See Klaproth, Tableau Historique de l'Asie, p. 116 sq.
[695] They are the Onoi, the "Tens," who at this time dwelt beyond the Scythians of the Caspian Sea (Dionysius Periegetes).
[696] It still persists, however, as a tribal designation both amongst the Kirghiz and Uzbegs, and in 1885 Potanin visited the Yegurs of the Edzin-gol valley in south-east Mongolia, said to be the last surviving representatives of the Uigur nation (H. Schott, "Zur Uigurenfrage," in Abhandl. d. k. Akad. d. Wiss., Berlin, 1873, pp. 101-21).
[697] Ch. de Ujfalvy, Les Aryens au Nord et au Sud de l'Hindou-Kouch, p. 28.
[698] "Notes on the Physical Anthropology of Chinese Turkestan and the Pamirs," Journ. Roy. Anthr. Inst. XLII. 1912.
[699] "The Uzi of the Greeks are the Gozz [Ghuz] of the Orientals. They appear on the Danube and the Volga, in Armenia, Syria, and Chorasan, and their name seems to have been extended to the whole Turkoman [Turki] race" [by the Arab writers]; Gibbon, Ch. LVII.