The oldest inscription in Türkic alphabet, the Issyk Inscription, written on a flat silver drinking cup, was found in 1970 in a royal tomb located within Balykchy (Issyk), a town in Kyrgyzstan near Lake Issyk, and was dated by 5th c. BC. In the tomb was a body of a man dressed from head to toe in magnificent attire, the clothes, jacket, pants, socks, and boots all had a total of 4,800 attached pieces of pure gold, greatest ever found in a tomb except Pharaoh Tutankhamen. The top of the cone-shaped crown covering ears and neck carried golden arrows emblem. A sword on the belt right side and a knife on the left were in sheaths. Beautiful relief ornaments of animal art decorated shields, belt and front of the hat. Radiocarbon tests determined the age of the finds as belonging to the fifth century BC. What was the world in the 5-th century BC? We have archeological discoveries, where dating is almost always somewhat speculative, and reconstructions of the ancient Greek maps, and the views of the Mesopotamian and Chinese records. From the Mesopotamian, Chinese, and Greek texts, from the archeological discoveries of the kurgans, from the written monuments, we get a glimpse of the nomadic nations of the Central Asia in the 5-th c. BC. The various interpretations of the graphics and contents of the inscription witness the paucity of the finds and the potential for the studies.

The difficulties in interpreting the same spelling are not staggering, all researchers working with texts not broken into words encounter them, and the task is complicated by the absence of vowels even if the modern language is known and a scribe is perfect, the bsncfvwls can be parsed quite differently, in addition to the “absence of vowels”. On another hand, with the today's capabilities, we can generate a list of possible options in seconds, given that we know most of the consonants, and have appropriate dictionaries and algorithms. This is, of course, applicable to any text with partially known phonetics, like the phonetized record of the Hunnic phrase [1] [2]. And on another hand, if any examined inscription is parsed into words of few phonemes (up to 3-4), that word can be practically read in any language, because statistical probability of accidental match of short words in any language is better than 1. Without semantic restrains, any short words can be read in any language. With some linguistic ingenuity, a short phrase resembling some sense can be assembled of such words in any language. The series of readings of the Issyk Inscription provides a viable example of this statistical warping. We should welcome the fact that the discussion finally broke off from the closeted bounds to the public review on the Internet. A light of day is a best disinfectant from inspired misrepresentations.

The work of F. Hamory perfectly illustrates the point of reading in any language, it produced a viable result free from unrestrained flights of the fantasy emblematic for the most of the other attempts. It is a fresh look at the old problem, with different approach and objective. Probably the most welcome feature of this work is that matches the brevity of the inscription with the brevity of interpretation, that alone attracts attention to the potentially viable result. The departed was given his chalice, along with all other travel necessities, for the arduous travel to the other world. In Scythia, such shallow goblets were clipped to the waist belt. They had ceremonial and utilitarian use. Few examples of such cups still sport a buckle. Old balbals in Eurasia (Scythian, and Kipchak grave stelas of 9th-13th cc. in Eastern Europe and Asia) depict a mortal toasting with a cup like the “talking” Issyk goblet. Similarly, some Etruscan and Roman goblets “talked” to the drinker with inscribed messages. Some terminological clarifications in the context of this work:

Rová, rovás - Hungarian term for runiform script
Abbreviation - Shortened form of a word (St, Cf, ie, kg, km, etc)
Ligature - Conventional symbolic depiction of a character consisting of two or more letters combined into one (æ, ch, dž, kh, sh, th, etc), or expression ($, %, @, &, etc)
Compound -  Róvás composites of combined letters, sometimes in complex ways, to create a new word composite, something like “mail-man”, in contrast to combined ligature
Cursive  - Cursively connected letters within words

For a listing of other images, publications and attempts to read click here. Posting's notes and explanations, added to the original text and not noted specially, are shown in (blue italics) in parentheses and in blue boxes.

An unusually rich “Scytian” burial was found in 1970 near Issik (aka Issyk), near Alma Ata, Kazakhstan in Central Asia, which also included a silver drinking bowl containing engraved runiform writing, along with a sword and hundreds of golden decorations that were sewn onto the clothes of the deceased. This was topped by a very tall conical headdress. The sex of the person buried in Issik is not certain but may have been a queen, since among her possessions there were also sewing needles. As we know, the sword and the military symbols were common with Scythian warrior women, who also took an active part in battles. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Issyk_kurgan

The approximately 2,500 year old drinking bowl with its engraved inscription is the earliest known example of a runiform script style ever found in Eurasia, it appears to be similar to the runiform scripts used by Turkic people and Hungarians, both ethnic Hungarians and Székely (Seklers), and not unique to just one group. According to J. Harmatta, the inscription has also some similarities with the Kharosthi script.

An ultimate source of these symbols may be the graphemes of ancient Central Europe, the graphemes of the Bronze Age cultures of Körös, Tordos and Vincha, the inscription graphemes resemble them, but none of phonetic values are known. While the graphemes appear to a degree similar in form to each other, the Turkic, Hungarian, and Etruscan runiform scripts are phonetically different. For example, Forrai’s (1994) claims that comparisons between Hungarian and Turkic alphabets share about 28.6% similarities based on form and sound, while the Hungarian alphabet shares about 43.4% with the Etruscan alphabet of the ancient Tuscany in Italy.

Of course many sounds went through natural changes as the language evolved, which probably affected these numbers. In Eastern Europe, the Late Scythian writing used a Greek script rather than runic, albeit their surviving writings are very rare and usually limited to just names written in Greek. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, different ethnic elements in Scythia had different languages.
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The engraving on the drinking bowl of the “golden man” of Issik.
Copied from Sándor Forrai, 1994.

I used a right to left (RTL) analysis of the script as shown in the numbered example, since runic was normally written that way, allowing the right handed person to write in a more convenient way while carving.

LATE FORM OF THE HUNGARIAN RUNIC “ROVÁS”

Suggested normalized transcription using rovás alphabet and rovás compounded scripting technique
      Mirrored image from RTL to LTR

In Scythian and early Hungarian and Turkic customs, such shallow drinking bowls were tied to the waist with some clip and belt. Several examples of such cups actually have a buckle on the edge of the cup. They had both ceremonial and utilitarian usage.
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Ancient statues in Asia, the Scythian, and the Kipchak grave monuments of 9th-13th cc. in Eastern Europe and Asia, often depict a person holding a cup as though they were praying for the buried deceased. The “talking” drinking bowl resembles similar messages found on Etruscan and Roman drinking vessels that addressed the drinker as though the cup was speaking to the person.

Not being an expert on runiform writing, which some Hungarians learn for fun. I specialize on historical phonetics and sound changes of the Hungarian language in relation to other languages. My suggestion here is far from being the only possible outcome or a definite evaluation; however the alphabetic representation found on the drinking bowl, is similar to Hungarian rovás. One distinction of the Issik runic writing is that due to being scratched onto the rounded surface of the bowl, it is slightly curved and tilted. Letters aren’t always nice and clear, and neatly aligned vertically and horizontally, just as our handwriting is not. In my translation, the order of the letters is from right to left, which was also common in old Hungarian rovás writing. The complex rounded symbols in Hungarian rovás are difficult to engrave with a knife or chisel, and are rarely used or were also angular, so it can safely be assumed that they are a later development of the Hungarian rovás alphabet, not expected in the 5th c. BC. They became useful after more flexible writing methods were used, rather than the common bichka writing knife. Usually the writing was engraved on squared wooden rods, and only rarely engraved in metal or stone. They were found also on rocks or metal, but it was much simpler to carve wood. Light weight and portability must have been more important then permanence. In Europe, little of the wood carvings remained from ancient times. Metal objects, especially those from gold were melted down, while stone remnants were damaged by erosion, covered up, defaced or used for building material.

We cannot expect this 2,500-years old sentence to use modern phonetics, since pronunciation is changing slowly over time and usually the vowels and even some consonants change slowly and sometimes even fade away. For example, even in the early Middle Ages, the letter O was barely used in Hungarian documents, while later, the U usually changed to O or V.

According to historical linguists, the letters D, Ö, LY, F, V, H, B, Z supposedly did not even exist in ancient Hungarian, so a smaller set of rovás symbols were adequate for these early times. Vowels were often not included, because they often were not important and phrases could be understood without them. Many Hungarian phrases can be understood by substituting the same vowel everywhere in the sentence. To consider the possibility that the Issyk writing is understandable in Hungarian has its merits, especially since according to the living traditions of the Kazakhstan's Majars, in Central Asia lived Hungarian splinter tribes from the Eastern Europe. We don’t know when they moved there, but several early migrations toward Asia from Eastern Europe are known, as indicated by archeology. Early Sumerian symbols were also found in eastern Europe, in Transylvania one and a half thousand years before they appeared in Mesopotamia. Some of those symbols are similar in form and sound to róvás. Letters like D, E, G, Gy, H, I, K, L, M, P, R, T, U, Ü represent root words in Sumerian, whose main sound reflects Hungarian letters and forms. As in Ha “fish” and the letter H in Hungarian [Dr Novotny Elemér, Sumir nyelv-magyar nyelv, 1978].
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There were two known migrations from the Eastern Europe to Asia. One in 2000 BC that ended up in India and on the Iranian Plateau at about 1600-1500 BC, and another at 1000-700 BC to the Aral Sea area, by completely different people. In 2000 BC these were Late Neolithic sedentary farming refugees from the Central Europe, and in 1000- 700 BC they were Timber Grave nomadic Kurganians. The first is archeologically undetectable. It is known from literary works and also detected genetically, the second left the relics of Horezmian civilization and is described anthropologically. Writing, however, is associated with the Zhou Scythians, who brought with them not only superior nomadic military, but also a developed bronze casting metallurgy, and the art of writing that grew to be used in the Chinese Bamboo Annals. The Zhou in China came from the west, where they may have been an offspring of the Su, which is related to Su-bari that eventually was incorporated into the later Turko-Hunnic groups. In Sumerian, Su was also a distinct dialect of Sumerian, along with the main Emegir dialect. The unique socketed design of the Zhou cast bronze axes point to their Mesopotamian origins via the Altai area, and they were exposed to Mesopotamia's practice of writing. A nomadic group, known as Guties in Mesopotamia, in the 21c. BC, ruled the Akkadian kingdom for four generations, after which they were kicked out from Akkad. Their language and Sumerian appears to have many ties to Turkic and Hungarian languages.

In old róvás writing many of the vowels were omitted, because they aren’t needed at all for morpheme elements, since the vowel is irrelevant and conforms to the root word’s vowel type. Hungarian rovás script also has a tendency to form joint compounds sometimes termed ligatures, although they are not depicting different phonemes but a composite that combines letters. The practice is quite similar to Sumerian cuneiform ligatures which combine two symbols to create not combined letters but a combined new word, something like the “mail-man”. These compounds are sometimes the hardest to decipher. For some I used Sándor Forrai’s transcription, who is an expert in runic writing of various old languages. His book included the Issik inscription without a translation (Forrai, 1994). Although difficult to read them out of context, they were understood by many, since even women were reading them as proven by the sewing needles with runiform writing found in Hungary. Unlike the Romanized versions of the Hungarian alphabet, the róvás alphabet was perfectly natural for the Hungarian language and reflected Hungarian phonetics, without accents, modifiers or any combinations. Note that the Hungarian J is unlike English, and is pronounced as a Y in English (Y in New York).

Transcription and reading

“For the virtuous-woman, (the) queen”

The modern asszony means lady but originally meant queen (Györfi György). Asszony is also a cognate of the Emesal-Sumerian word for queen (g)asan. Transcription separates symbols, and not the words, with spaces.

The first symbol is a compound of three separate letters, I, R, and J. The second symbol is also a compound of 3 symbols N, A, S (or N, S, A). The third symbol has a mirror image of the two N symbols, and it would look similar to an H if the arches were overlapping, but since they are drawn separately, it cannot be an H but renders two forms of N. Also, in the Hungarian language the H is a later development, derived from a hard H or KH. The final sign in the group, which looks like a rotated Z, is a single letter, a word final grapheme aK.
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Image	Transliteration
Archaic	Y-SZ	SZ- A- T -	aK :
Modern	ISZ -	SZ -A- T -	oK
	drink	you	PLURAL

I.e. “(you) drink”

The first symbol shown could  be simply a J (English Y) and perhaps combined with an SZ (English S), but that would make no difference here. The second compound symbol which looks something like a 4 is the slightly clockwise rotated letter A, but to its left a slightly right-leaning vertical line is the letter SZ, while the symbol that follows it looks something like the form of the Y, which represents a T in rovás. It is commonly a vertical line with a side branch. It is also tilted over a little bit. The final sign is a word final aK, which on occasion is also internal to the word, although internal to the word more commonly used is a diamond shaped eK. That sign is the Sumerian graphemes for Ki.

Image	Transliteration
Archaic	Ti	ZH, eSZ	T-é	Re
Modern	Ti	SZ	Té (+let-é)	Re
	honor			-for (her)

The phrase says “for his/her honor”

The form likeY is a T in rovás. It is commonly a vertical line with a side branch. The ZS representing a palatalized Z, instead instead of SZ “s”, in this example is actually vertically flipped, but there is no other compatible symbol, unless it’s interpreted as a compound of SZ+SH, which wouldn’t change the word. The word TiSZTA is close to the Turkic word töze “clean, pure”. It is claimed to be a form of Slavic chista, probably a cognate of the same Turkic word. Since the Hungarian sound rules never change ch to t, the Slavic origin would be unlikely. Usually, that does not bother etymologists. The R form for a locative suffix -r also can be a nearly horizontally slanted line, as is illustrated in the alphabet table above; both forms were used equally often.
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Image	Transliteration
Archaic	SZá	TO	B a
Modern	SZá-	D -	B a
	mouth	your	into

This means “into your mouth”

The second lower part of the symbol is a compound of the O, which was extended to include T on it’s top. Since the ancient Hungarian purportedly didn’t have voiced stops like Etruscan or early Sumerian, the B and D couldn’t have been used, and various forms of aspirated Th or Dh and Ph, Bh would have evolved into D and B. The second lower part of the symbol is a ligature of the O, which was extended to include T on it’s top.

Image	Transliteration
Archaic	J ZS	aTa	P>Vi	SZ >Zé	T ::	C/S- aK :
Modern	IS>ÖS -	aTya :	Bi>Vi -	Zé -	T :	CSAK
	ancient	father	water	his		only

This means “(we drink) only the waters of god (ancient-father)” .

The character is a compound of the above J and ZS; stands for Pi/Vi/Bi addressed above; is a compound of C/S- and AK : addressed above.

The Ata or Ada means father in a range of languages, from Turkic to Sumerian, Dravidian, and others, Cf. Sumerian ada, Hungarian atya, Turkic ata, Dravidian attan, Celtic atair; the origin of the Celtic atair ascends to some Central Asian, Eastern European, or Mesopotamian areas that were homes for the other examples of shared words. That is consistent with with the attestations of the Celtic migration from the Eastern Europe to Iberia and predomination of the R1b Y-DNA among the Celtic people.

The word IS is an archaic form of ÖS, signifying ancient or ancestor. It is quite similar to the Turkic "ačV". The usual Hungarian word for God also includes this element as YS-TEN which became ISTEN, a word for an invisible to the eye “ancestral god/spirit”, Tengri in Turkic and Dingir in Sumerian.

Image	Transliteration
Archaic	Tá-	R -	SHa-	S- SZá- G
Modern	Tá	R -	SHa-	S- Sá- G

The meaning is: “the social group, society, or the tribe”

The ancient Hurrian-Urartuan-Mittani languages of northern Mesopotamia and Anatolia also used this same word as tarshua, referring to all the people of a group, a collective appellation. Etruscan may also have taken their self designation from there. The T looks similar to a Y, in it’s most commonly used form, followed by the most common form of the R mentioned earlier. The following symbol S/SH could easily be confused with an “I” except that it usually has a shorter line crossing vertical staff. Instead, it is the letter SH (S in Hungarian) slightly tilted counterclockwise. Then the last compound is again either ZS (pronounced like J in French name Jock ), or SZ+SH; it is followed by a leaning character shaped as a Roman F that represents G.
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Image	Transliteration
Archaic	eGé–S-éG	Jó?	I	CAK:
Modern	eGé S-éG	Jó (+re)	I -	SZ-uK:
	health & wholeness	good (for)	drink	- we

 It should be noted that transcription separates symbols, and not the words, with spaces. In this case ISZUK means “we drink it” so that CAK/SZUK in the above example does not mean “we”. The first symbol  is a compound of G that looks like a leaning reversed F, then an SH below it, and another G facing to the right. This means “health”. The second is the letter J, (English Y) which is JÓ and means “good ”, as in “good health”. A similar word is used in Turkic and Finno-Ugric languages to mean “good”. The next letter is an I, followed by a compound of TS “C”+AK addressed above, it is a compound of the upward pointing arrow and the word final AK that resembles a rotated Z. The C pronounced as “Ts” in this word in modern Hungarian is softened to SZ (s). This phrase may represent an archaic grammatical feature, where the adjective follows the noun, similar to Sumerian and some Finno-Ugrian languages, where it can sometimes be used either leading or lagging the noun. Indications are that unlike a definite word order, in everyday speech Sumerian had both word orders, that is attested by the remnants of the scribal tablets of the Sumerian students, in their scribal schools the students at times had the order reversed.

Combining all the phrases together, we obtain the following sentence:

“Drink [isz] yea(pl) [uk] to the honor [tiszt] of [-nak] the virtuous [eréj(es)] -woman [nő]- (the) queen [asszoñ],  (the) water [viz] of god [ős-atya]. Only [Csak] for [ra] (the) health/wholeness [egész-ség] (of the) society/community [társa-ság] we [uk] drink [isz]”

In Hungarian:

“Eréj(es) nő asszonynak iszátok tiszte(let)ére (az) ös-atya vizét. Csak a társaság jó egészségére iszuk”

The word order of the Hungarian to English translation is in proper English grammar, not in Hungarian grammar. The word order in the actual text matches the correct word order in Hungarian grammar. Various archaic agglutinative languages initially did not use an article (the) and later had to borrow it from neighboring languages. In agglutinative languages, affixes serve as discriminators between verbs and nouns, so no articles are needed, and they need not to be borrowed, unless the language is creolized and lost its functional affixes, like has the English. Thus, the Turkic, Finnish, and Sumerian had to borrow articles from other languages; Hungarian adopted the word for “that” and used it also for “the”. Therefore, the absence of articles in the inscription is natural.

Incredibly, after 2,500 years, the reconstructed Hungarian translation is almost too “modern” and too grammatically perfect. That outcome is quite unexpected. A few suffixes are missing; probably they were not needed then. The adjectival marker -Vs, for example, is used only when it helps to clarify the word. However, the reconstructed phonetics is somewhat less close, particularly due to expected softening of sibilants like C “ts” to SZ, and ZS to Sh.
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According to J. Harmatta (1999), the language of the inscription came from a “Khotan Saka” dialect of the Scythian language. The script is a sufficiently close version of the Kharosthi script to be readable, and the dating of the Issyk kurgan and its artifacts is in error because in the 5th c. BC, the Kharosthi script did not exist yet, thus Harmatta suggests to amend the date to the third century BC. At the same time, Harmatta notes “similarity of several letters to the characters of the Orkhon–Yenisey Türk runic script”, and the “more archaic, more angular, simpler letter forms than the other” inscriptions written in Kharosthi. The Orkhon-Enisean alphabets are younger than the Issyk inscription by a millennia. To fill that gap Harmatta offers as sources for those distinctly non-Kharosthi graphemes “the Aramaic prototypes of both the Kharosthı and the Sogdian letters (the latter serving as models for the Türk runic signs)”. The “Aramaic prototypes” ascend as far back as 9th c. BC, but to undermine the credibility of the Harmatta's suggestion, they have no connection with the distinctly non-Aramaic origin of the unique letters of the Orkhon-Enisean alphabets used in the Issyk inscription. The Hungarian róvás script is also forced into an Arameic origin. At the same time, the connection of the Issyk and Orkhon-Enisean alphabet with the Phoenician alphabet is attested by the presence of the letter s/sh found in these alphabets, and also in the Aramaic and Hebrew daughters of the Phoenician script; that connection lies outside of the Harmatta's purview of the “several letters (similar) to the characters of the Orkhon–Yenisey Türk runic script”.

In his reading of the inscription in Kharosthi, the Harmatta reading of those “several letters (similar) to the characters of the Orkhon–Yenisey Türk runic script” absent in Kharosthi is not explained. The unfortunate absence of transcription in the Harmatta's essay does not allow neither a reconstruction of that reading nor its analysis. The circular logics in the dating, where the dating is asserted on the premise of the dating of the Kharosthi script, which is the premise underlying the reading, likewise undermines the credibility of the Harmatta's suggestion for the dating. The Harmatta's use of the misnomer Khotanese Saka, i.e. the Hotan language assumed to be the unknown language of Sakas, also undermines the credulity of the Harmatta's reading. The Harmatta's version reads:

“The vessel should hold wine of grapes, added cooked food, so much, to the mortal, then added cooked fresh butter on”

The Harmatta's reading translated to English numbers 19 words plus 2 articles, and 89 letters excluding 2 articles. A tough case to make from a base of total 25 to 28 letters of the inscription. To comprehend the meaning of the Harmatta's reading is even more perplexing, either as cooking instructions for a fruit cocktail (wine of grapes), a dinner (cooked food), or an appeal to a deceased (to the mortal), and the assumption that some sane scribe would scratch this profanity as a last gift to a prince or queen.

Another reading along the Indo-European lines is that of S.V. Riabchikov (date). Riabchikov's reading involves a Slavono-Indo-Arian-Minoan Linear A (B) alphabets and identical complement of languages. The credulity of the Riabchikov's reading is beyond incredible. The Riabchikov's version reads:

“fairytale horse; in, into, at fury; aspiration
Fire, the path though the sky; to turn round and round; this is fire/top; sky”

Afterword

There are at least 10 versions as to the meaning of the inscription, while next to nothing is actually known about the various Scythian languages. Herodotus reported 7 Scythian languages in the Eastern European Scythia alone. Nothing is positively known of those 7 languages. The sheer number of words in Harmatta's and S.V. Riabchikov translations, like a similar state for the Turkic attempts, appear to greatly overload the number of symbols used, with resultant rather pointless phrases. The proposed translation at least is meaningful and barely deviates from the grammar and phonetics of the Hungarian language. Also, it is incumbent to note that more than a single language used similar script, as the similar Turkic, Etruscan and Hungarian scripts prove. The Etruscan however is alleged to derive its alphabet from the early Greek and Phoenician.

In general, historians avoid the Hungarian róvas alphabet, it was mislabeled as a 14th century creation, because there are many examples found from that period, when the reformation churches started using it again. The later alphabet just “coincidently” happened to include graphemes similar to much older graphemes from thousands of years earlier. In the 10th century Pope banned the older Hungarian rovás, referred to by earlier chronicles. As strange and illogical as is to ban something that did not exist yet, it was very typical of the kind of linguistic science in Hungary that still lingers today. Hungarian historiography is full of outsider linguists, such as Paul Hunsdorfer, one of the founders of the Hungarian Finno-Ugric theory, who have gone to great lengths to obliterate róvas. Collection of “rovás” of Gábor Szentkatolnai, and who knows how many others, were physically destroyed. In the end, that is but one of the many reasons why Hungarians resent the theses of the reigning linguistics as a science, and those linguists who show contempt for the Hungarian cultural traditions.
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