During the millenniums of their history on the expanses of Eurasia, the Türkic-speaking people used their
own and adopted systems of writing. It is preposterous to suggest that a Eurasian family
of peoples comprising now 85+ nations that populate Eurasia from one end to the other was
illiterate. Throughout their known history, Türkic people bordered on literate people,
ruled over literate people, had literate people in their midst, lived amidst literate
people, and could not have escaped literacy even if they tried to very hard. The notion
that the greatest empires of their days, the Eastern and the Western Hunnic Empire, and
their descendents, could exist without literate administrative apparatus is derisory. The most widespread, during the last seven
centuries of the present era, was the use of the Arabic alphabet, adopted
with the spread of Islam among Türks. In the last century the Arabic
alphabet was mostly replaced by the Latin-derived alphabets, and now the
Arabic alphabet is used by the Türks only in the countries where it is a
national script: Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Pakistan, Syria. In the
countries controlled by the USSR, a whirlwind, designed to break the spine of
intellectuality, first forbade the Arabic script and its writings, replacing it
with a Latin, and soon the Latin script was rabidly replaced by a
variety of custom-deformed Cyrillic-derived mutually almost incomprehensible scripts
for each administrative division of the subdivided country. In
the territory controlled by the PRC, the Latin script was introduced for two
decades, and then Arabic script was re-institutionalized.
The following collection illustrates the scripts in use prior to the
adoption of the Arabic script as a "lingua franca" between the Türkic people.
It should be earnestly stressed that the dating of the most artifacts is purely
conjectural, reflecting perfectly the perceptions of the reporters but not the
facts. In those cases when the artifacts are not self-dating, the real
scientific dating analysis is still pending. The collection is a little
sampling, it is far from being even a simple systematic collection.