I'd like to welcome you to the Australian Centre on China and the World. For those of you who don't know who I am, my name is Benjamin Penney, I'm the Director of the Centre. And first, as is customary, I'd like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we meet and to pay respects to their elders past and present. Tonight is a very auspicious occasion. As you know, the Morrison Lecture is one of the university's oldest continuous public lecture and indeed one of the oldest continuous public lectures in the world, especially in any field to do with Asia. The Morrison Lecture predates the ANU. The first was given in 1932 in Canberra in the building that was then known as the Institute of Anatomy. For those of you who are old enough and Canberra resident, long enough to know where that was, now the so-called National Film and Sound Archive. But for those of us of a certain age, it's where Phalep's heart resided. That's where it was given in the old days. There were nine lectures given after and including 1932. It stopped in 1941 with the Second World War. When the ANU was founded after the war, the Morrison Lecture was also re-founded and started again in 1948 and it has been given every year since. It is officially the Morrison Lecture in Ethnology and it was originally funded by the Chinese community of Canberra. For those of you who are interested in the history of the Morrison Lecture, our Journal East Asian History presented, reprinted the first eight of the nine first lectures before the war a few years ago with a short essay introducing the early history of the Morrison Lecture. The one that we didn't print is because it was not available. We would have printed otherwise and some other selections of the Morrison Lecture post-war were printed in an earlier edition of the East Asian History. It's a very notable lecture. I'm so pleased that it's continuing. It is run run by a three person committee which at the moment consists of Professor Andrew Kipnas, Dr Mark Strange and myself and rotates amongst us as the kind of primary chooser of the person. I'll introduce Mark in a moment who will introduce our speaker tonight but I have to say that I'm really pleased that Professor Kane has agreed to give tonight's lecture. Danny is one of the great scholars of the Chinese world that Australia has produced. A great linguist, a great historian and a lovely man as well. I think it's very appropriate that he's put up this first slide that you probably recognize that that is Danny a few years ago now but it's great to see that he's been rendered immortal in artistic works as well. That's all I'll say for the moment. It's my pleasure now to introduce Mark Strange who is currently on secondment here in the Australian Centre on China and the World normally found in the School of Culture, History and Language and one of our great historians of pre-modern China continuing in the tradition that this university has always had to study the pre-modern era of Chinese history we take it seriously and Mark is one of the latest incarnations of that serious intent so very appropriate person to introduce Danny. That was a slightly overblown introduction when I was sitting next to tonight's speaker but there you go. Anyway, good evening ladies and gentlemen and welcome to this year's George E Morrison lecture. My name as Ben has already said is Mark Strange, I'm a member of the Air New College of Asia in the Pacific and again with Ben and with Andrew Kipnis I'm honored to be a member of the organizing committee for the lecture series and it's in that capacity that I'm making this introduction tonight. So as Ben has already explained, this is the 78th contribution to this extremely prestigious and long-running annual lecture series the George E Morrison lecture in Ethnology and the association with George Morrison points up a particular concern with China but actually I'm more interested in dwelling briefly in this introduction on the other part of the title on the focus on Ethnology. It's quite a long way from where I normally stand but I think, by my understanding, Ethnology is the study, the comparative study of cultures of different peoples and as a corollary of cultural contact, please correct me if that's a misapprehension but if that is right then I think the topic of tonight's lecture an attempt to understand the Ketan people who I'll return to in a second in their own language strikes me as more than usually relevant to the foundational principles of this particular lecture series with that focus on Ethnology and actually I suppose we could say that Ethnology runs right through this evening from the acknowledgement of country right through to the topic of the lecture. As we will no doubt hear in what follows, the Ketan people inhabited, well they came from obscure origins but they inhabited areas of northeast Asia from about the 4th century through to the 13th century. They founded the state of Liao in the early 10th century and this was a polity that exerted a formative influence on successive Han Chinese states but it's only really in recent years that the extent of Ketan influence on their Han Chinese neighbors has really started to receive its due acknowledgement, has been recognized in scholarship for how important it really was and tonight's speaker has been at the forefront of Anglophone efforts in that direction as in Anglophone contributions to that vital I think vital scholarly endeavor to better understand the Chinese world by understanding the world of its neighbors. So for the past several decades, Danny Kane has been a leading authority on the Ketan language as well as on the language of another rival to medieval Han Chinese polities, the Jutons. He originally comes from Melbourne but he took his PhD at the ANU in 1975 with a thesis on Juton language of the 12th and 13th century Jin state. That research then became the basis of his 1989 monograph, the Sino-Juton vocabulary of the Bureau of Interpreters. I hear that his first acquaintance with Ketan goes back to 1970 but his book on the language and script of Ketan, published by Brill in 2009 is without doubt the standard English language work on that subject. It was described by one reviewer as quote a significant step forwards towards the goal of deciphering the Ketan language which the same reviewer suggested quote, among all the undeciphered languages is probably the one which has the greater chance of being one day fully understood. That raised a slight smile in the light of the abstract that Danny supplied us so I hope that tonight's lecture may serve to put those remarks into their full and proper context. Also on the study of languages past and present, Professor Kane has written an introductory work on the history and usages of the Chinese language and it's with those research interests that he has held academic posts at the University of Melbourne, at Peking University and he was professor of Chinese at Macquarie University from 1997 until his retirement. But Danny Kane's interests have also long extended beyond the languages and cultures of those medieval peoples. For example, he's published several articles on the late Korean imperial states, variegated engagement with the international community in the 19th and into the very early 20th centuries. And Ben rightly pointed out today there's also another kind of pertinent link. The 19th National Congress of the CCP opened in Beijing yesterday as many of you will know and in the context of that event of crucial significance for the future composition of the CCP but also the future direction of its policies. It might be worth noting that, noting Professor Kane's contribution to a 1993 edited volume, it was called Modernization of the Chinese Past, the volume was called Modernization of the Chinese Past, but his paper traced and to use its title, Irrational Belief Among the Chinese Elite. So we have the full spectrum from the medieval to the absolutely contemporary and relevant. His observations in that paper incidentally and much else besides, I suspect, were based on a parallel career in diplomacy. He joined the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs shortly after completing his PhD in 1975. He was posted to Beijing in 1976 and later on he was also a cultural counsellor at the Australian Embassy in Beijing in the mid-1990s. So it's with that extraordinary combination of technical expertise and intellectual breadth in mind that I'd like to welcome this year's Morrison lecturer, Daniel Kane, to guide us through some attempts to decipher the Qitan language and by so doing to add to our understanding of the ethnology of the Chinese world and that of its neighbours. After that, what can I say? We may as well go home and talk about the good old days. The first few slides I prepared here, I didn't quite know how it was going to pan out tonight. So these are just sort of the kill time when we get ourselves organised and so on and so on. So I just mentioned this fellow is the guy that I call the new boss. So if you turn up on Monday morning and say, guess what? We've got a new boss and this guy turns up. You know he is saying, don't mess with me. Actually it's a death mask of some important official. This is just a very outline map. The Liao capital city, which is, don't worry too much about it, but it's very close to a place called Shifeng in modern China. It's about two hours' drive away. Down there somewhere you can find Nanjing. Nanjing is what we now call the basis. More or less the same place as Beijing, Beijing. So it's a fairly big territory. This one, one of my friends didn't like it very much, but I put it there anyway because it shows you that really it was quite a huge territory. There's the Sisi, there's the Song Dynasty, so-and-so, and there's the Liao Dynasty. Now the Liao were a very particular, very strange lot. They started off, as Mark was saying, they established a dynasty, but they first called themselves the Great Kitan State. And then after 50 years or so they changed their name to the Great Liao Dynasty. Nobody knows why. And then after another 50 years they changed their name again, the Great Kitan State again. And then another 50 years time they changed their name back again. This has not happened any time in China's history and nobody knows why. Why they had this urge to go change their name every now and then. This is just a tomb-mule of what they looked like with his boots, his clothes, and what that. Like I said, there were just a few very introductory slides before we start the lecture as such. Okay. I just got a couple of quotations here, which is quite, well I think they're relevant. The Cyphermans are by far the most glamorous achievements of scholarship. There was a touch of magic about unknown writing. Moa spoke the story of the Cypherman. The Cypherman of a newly discovered or perennially mysterious text is the most glamorous aspect of the study of writing systems, Daniels and Bright. Now I don't know if everybody in this room would agree that the Cypher, the Cypher of dead languages is the most exciting thing you could imagine. Probably nobody would, and certainly it's a minority view. But for people who get into this sort of stuff, it really is extremely attractive and extremely, what could I say, not exactly glamorous, not something you can't put down. Once you've got hooked a lot, you stay hooked for a long time. I might just mention, by the way, where Mark was talking about, I should pay tribute to all my various teachers and whatnot, but in particular, he got a record built who died about a year ago, a slightly less than a year ago. When I was doing a PhD, ages ago, we started talking about Etruscan. And he said, oh, if you're interested in Etruscan and Chinese, you might agree that it's a book by Witt Vogel and Fong on the history of the Chinese society of the Alps. And so I did, and then I was more or less hooked because he was an undersythered language that you more or less had to know about China and Chinese to get some sort of grasp of. So if we look particularly at the key-down script, sometimes people write with a K-H and sometimes with a K, by the way. K-H is sort of considered a bit old-fashioned now, sort of like Beijing and Peking, because it's the same place, it's different spelling. It is still a long way to the heart of the jungle of the K-H writing system. The K-H script remains one of the most fascinating problems in the history of the Altaic world, a much hard work remains to be done. Before we shall be able to read, for instance, the K-H rhymes in memory of Emperor Xuanyi, the poetess who was put to death 911 years ago, Cairo, who was a Hungarian expert on Mongolian and Turkish and so on, 1987. I particularly wanted to use that quotation because in the book I wrote, in which I have a copy here, I transcribed that particular inscription. So even though we're not on top of it, we're more on top of it than we used to be. But I'll explain what I mean later. The next quotation is probably the most appropriate of all. There's such a famous grammatologist as Nishida Tatsu, who is obviously a Japanese expert, could only say to tell you the truth, the K-H script is becoming more and more incomprehensible. Things which we were able to understand before were even less able to understand now. So it's like a cryptic crossword part of Altaic people. You think you've got that corner right, but then something goes wrong and the whole thing is back to square one again. And a lot of attempts to suffocate aren't very much of that type. Okay, this is a great mind-sinker like. This is a quotation from Yorke Yandoren, who mentioned about the possibility of full decipherment. The K-H script remains one of the most crucial unsolved problems of comparative Mongolian studies. It is also one of the, which is born by my interest, is also one of the last remaining scripts in the world for which the prospects of full decipherment are good. So everybody knows that the face starts to just switch nobody can read and there's the interstellar script which nobody can read and so on and so on. But for various reasons, it's very unlikely that those scripts are ever going to be read unless something really turns up, some sort of a bilingual or some sort of a dictionary or something like that. But at the moment, Kitan looks as if it could be and should be able to read a syphid. So it's just a matter of going to this or keep working on it until something appears. What we find when we look at other famous decipherments of ancient Egyptian, of Champagne, for example, Old Persian, Linnia B and Ventress, Ancient Greek, I think a lot of people know about these things, were under syphid languages which various geniuses sorted out of the seemingly incomprehensible mess. And they worked out there's a sort of pattern going on there. And when it's all sorted out, it turns out that in each and every one of these cases, it is related to a language which is known. So ancient Egyptian was related to Coptic. The Mayan script was related to modern Mayan sort of languages. Old Persian was obviously related to later versions of Persian and so on and so on. Now if you don't have that underlying language, you're really in trouble. So do we have an underlying language in the case of Ketan? Well, that is one of the major questions. Ketan then, and this one takes it for granted that the language is Mongolian. So I wouldn't say everybody but 90% of people who work on this presume that Ketan is a form of Mongolian. The problem is that you've got to prove these things. And when you apply, when you try to read a Mongolian inscription, having a, you know, just a dictionary in your hand, you can't make any sense of Ketan or using Mongolian. It seems to me, well, not only seems to me, I put forward this view and then people said, yeah, you're darling. So the Finnish guy I mentioned before, he's very good at thinking out possible hypotheses. So he came up with the idea of what he calls paramongolic. And paramongolic according to his, this is purely a hypothesis, there's no proof of this. But before Genghis Khan and the Mongol, the Paks-Mongolikas we were talking about before. Before Genghis Khan, there were a lot of tribes, peoples, Minzul in that area who spoke languages which were in some way sort of a bit like Mongolian, which had been wiped out in due course and which had been assimilated by Mongolian or what have you. But there's still some traces of Mongolian inside Ketan. So when people say, aha, inside, you know, in the Ketan language there's this section that looks a bit like Mongolian, that selection looks like a bit like Mongolian. That's where they get from. But still you have to prove it. But that's the concept of paramongolia. Now we get down to the more interesting part. Most of you tonight, well many of you tonight, I should have said, have been to Sian and you've been to the tomb of Empress Wol. And either your guidebook or your guide or what have you will take you to this very famous inscription which is called the steely without an inscription. A steely is a huge rock, a huge stone on which an inscription is written. But this one doesn't have an inscription on it. And this had to do with Empress Wol's view because she was a sort of a Buddhist, was that by writing down a list of her achievements that limits them. And so by writing something down you are saying you are putting a limit to what she did. So if you write nothing, you are not putting any limit there. So her achievements are limitless. But if you happen to be there on maybe on a particularly auspicious occasion, you'll see that in fact there was a black blob there which you normally would just look and say, oh yeah, that's it and move on. But if you are interested you might want to know what is this black blob and why did somebody get up and put it there. What it is, and you can't see it from the ground of course because it's too far up, it's about three meters above the ground. But if you happen to have a telescope or binoculars, if you happen to be walking around China with a telescope, you can sort of vaguely work it out but it's not a very good way of doing it. Or this is indeed what the black blob is. And as you can see the black, this is the so-called rubbing.  And as you can see, and I've got a slide there too, the thing at the top don't worry too much about that, that's just the Chinese seal script. But underneath that there's something incomprehensible followed by something written in classical Chinese. Now this is the Rosetta Stone of Kidan Studies. And why do we call it the Rosetta Stone? Because the Rosetta Stone of course was the key to understanding ancient Egyptian and Shabanias sort of worked it out. And what it is, I'll see if we can get a better shot of it. Yes, that's it, that's what it looks like. And that's a rubbing and that's essentially what I just showed you. We said that's much bigger and clearer. So here we have something very strange. Well, not very strange but very particular because if we read the Chinese, as we're doing these, if we translate it into English, which was done in recent times, the first translation was in 1860 by a missionary and a psychologist called Wiley.  If you're not a Chinese, somebody will translate it for you and you know what it means. And it even says there somewhere towards the end, this is a translation that's a Chinese version. This is a translation of what is on the right. So in other words, this is on the right and whatever it is, this is a Chinese translation. So this is a bilingual. Heaven's gift to every, this would be to sufferer. And so all you then have to do is to work out what cause was to what and you've done it. Except that's not the way it's worked out but I'll tell you how it was worked out. And what we're going to do tonight, whatever else we do is another matter that we're going to read this. So this is our text for tonight and at the beginning of the evening, which was 20 minutes ago, none of us had heard of it mainly. Well, I held it upside down or did something like that. But I shall show you how we have been able to manage to work out what that means and why it means, what it means. And then of course it's a matter of expanding that knowledge to other inscriptions because there are about 30 inscriptions in this sort of writing and that is a Ketan small script. Okay, so here we go. In front of the tomb of Empress Wu, we just said that it is a bilingual in Ketan and Chinese and this is what it says. I've got the Chinese version but it's coming up later. The younger brother of the Great Jin State, now question number one, the Great Jin State implies that this is Juchu. It's the Jin dynasty. And so that misled people for a good century or so because they thought it was the Juchu language they were reading but actually it was quite a different language. Okay, so there is the younger brother of the Great Jin State. Campaign commander which is a title, military commissioner, court attendant, all titles. But sometimes in the border area there were no matters to attend to. So he was in charge of a particular area, there was much going on and he was a bit bored. So he went hunting to the south side of Liangshan Mountain. So that's all very clear. When he arrived at the tending tombs of the town, which is where Empress Wu was tomb and rather related tombs nearby, the halls and corridors were in a state of decay. There was nothing to be seen. He ordered issues to the authorities to gather workmen to make repairs. And this is very easy to imagine. You know, here comes the emperor's brother, he turns up the hall places in the corridor for mess.   And he said I'll be back. And he did, he came back later. And now he returned to visit the tombs. The paintings were like new. Surrounding corridors were on all four sides. He was inexplicably delighted. Maybe he was an Australian. Afterwards he drank wine with the prefect of Liang and he returned home. So, you know, they had a bit of a drink. And then he went home again. So that's what it means. We thought, well, we're getting somewhere because, you know, there's the Qitan, there's the English. The question is what part of the English corresponds to what part of the Qitan or vice versa. And then it's got the date at the end. The date was the 12th year of the Tianhui period, 1134, midwinter, the 14th day. Court minister, director of more official titles, operations, Huang Yingqi, the prefect of Yeozhou, Wangui, wrote this in accordance with the edict. On the right it's a translation of the text, which I mentioned before. It tells you in plain Chinese that, you know, this is a translation. Okay. So, if we look at the Qitan translation, I'll write to us, see how long this goes. Yeah, it's better to have a quick look at this because it's all in Chinese. I won't do too much. I won't do too much or other. But here we have, this is an official title. OTE official title. P.M. Place name. P.M. Place name. P.M. Place... Should we P.M. Place name? OTE official title. So all these TWs and NUMs and what not, they're like little arrows. This is an official title, Governor General. That's an official title, you know, or whatever it may be. So, when you are looking for a little gap, something which you can start working on, a good place to start is I'll go back here. A good place to start is Place names or Personal names or something like that because they tend to be written in the Chinese names are written in Keytown script. So when you are sort of hanging this up on your wall, I've also got a hanging there and everybody's very welcome to come and have a look at them later. You seem to spend an awful lot of time looking at the wall when you do Keytown studies. You just sort of sit there, waiting for inspiration to strike. And occasionally it does. So, we construct at Woods Abbey. We've got great and gold and then this is after the job is already been done. Go and kaha and go and do a liao yishari. Basically, if we start off in the very beginning we can see what did this guy do. He was bored, he went out to hunt. Where did he go to hunt? Liang Shan. What letter of the alphabet does Liang Shan all in Chinese? And then we look later in the tomb, in the inscription, which I'll show you in a minute. We see that he had a drink at the Magistrate of Liqiu. That also is a place now which begins with L. And lo and behold, you've got the same sort of letters there. So you say letters have a hypothesis that this is l. And so you go scrounging in the inscription, looking for another l. And you find Tang Qianling, the Qianling tombs of the Tang Dynasty. A Ling tomb could be considered a place name and ends in, let's start with L and the next syllable again. That's interesting. Because the name of the official who wrote this thing at the end was called Huang Yingxi and lo and behold it's with Ning, which is the same thing there. So it confirms that you've got an ying up there. Quick question. How to get this working again? 1115 it started. 1115 started. The reason for this is that's a very interesting question and it's not complicated but just a little bit deeper. What's going on here? And what is going on in fact is that people still preferred the writing in Qitan and in the Qitan script even though it was a gendarmisty that the Jewishians had their own script but it was very rarely used and the Jewish and upper classes had been educated in Qitan and so when they wanted to take the poetry or something they did it in Qitan. So even though this was doing the gendarmisty which was run by the Jewishians it's sort of like in English for example people might put up a sign 50 years ago people might put up a sign in Latin just because it looks better. It doesn't mean to say that we're still in the Roman Empire but that is basically very sharp because and that was what confused people for so long because they thought it was Jewish and there was no way in seeing we've got a bit of time which is not related to this just to finish off that story by the way people thought it was in Georgian until a Belgian priest this is a story of Skaldagari so I won't go into it at the moment unless we have time later but anyway he happened to be nearby when peasants still excavated the tomb of the Qingxian Emperor in 1923 when Northern China was in a state of chaos. And when he excavated it was clearly a Qidani thing and then people realized aha this is the same script as the words of a script in the NCR therefore it's not Georgian after all it's really Qidani and that had certain important consequences. Okay we can get back to where we were this is probably something like it sounded or what it was when we work it out. Why do I do great gold? Because in capital letters we know what these words mean but we don't know how they were pronounced. Now some people would say we'll call this something Mongolian looking but there's no evidence at all that the word for great had anything to do with the Mongolian word for great or that the Qidani word for gold but you know what it means gold because it was the great gold empire. Because in his region there was nothing going on at the Liangshan at the side of it he went hunting and then so there should be a there should be a anyway he went hunting and he discovered that things were in an awful mess so he called together the nadir the heads who were local locally there and told them to clean it up and you can get the general idea then he came back later and everything was like new and therefore with the heads he drank some wine and then he went back home again at that time it was heaven on the the second fourth day it happened in the year of the tiger year of the tiger in middle winter on the 14th day it was so even after 10 minutes or so we got a general idea of what this was all about but we haven't quite finished yet this is the same sort of thing but noting what are the official titles and so on this is a Qitan text you see great god Gurin which probably almost certainly is a word for a state the great Jin state because the word obviously meant he was a younger brother of the emperor but if you're an emperor you could be a huangdi or you could be a kahan you could be a khan so people just didn't know which one it was and spent many years trying to work out but eventually they worked out it really was kahan and then Chouji Hu was another one it's a Chinese title which means minister of war or something like this but it didn't look like anything in China it wasn't until in a lot of hard work that people worked out that Chouji meant war and Hu means in charge of in charge of war King Liao is another official title Shadi which is a Qitan word meaning a court attendant somebody who would have his official duties in the court because in the region and so on so this we don't have to read it but you can see the same sort of thing you say here's Nidur again the heads are the thing and here's the date and here's the tiger and here is the middle and this is winter and this is four day and it goes on and on so that is essentially a transcription of translation of that particular inscription once you get your head around that of course you can start going in different directions because you say okay we know that the word for official in charge is Nidur the heads we talk to the you know heads meaning boss but then if you look at other inscriptions because we're about 30 odd inscriptions in this language and you say oh look there it is here's the word which means to be in charge of something and then what happens next oh look here's the word for war now what's going on here and so you can expand you know you started you've got a little bit of a grasp of what's going on and the more then you move into other practically now whenever people discover a an inscription they find something new you know that only one thing maybe it's more than one thing but there's a little bit of progress every time except the progress is very, very small now this particular type of script that we've been looking at is called the Ketan small script and why is it called the Ketan small script you may ask because the Ketans also had two of not only two or heart who are but they had two sort of scripts and this is really very strange because why would anybody invent two scripts so I've got a little quotation here when we look at the last quote but basically when the emperor came to I think he'd been on the throne for ten years or something and he he called together, he ordered a group of Chinese literate Chinese to create a script for the Ketan language and so the Chinese took Chinese characters and re-put them back together again and you see sometimes some modern Chinese poets do this sort of thing they get characters and they sort of have different radicals and different phonetics and anyway the Ketans were doing it a thousand years ago but then according to the so in the history of the Liao dynasty and one has to be very careful the history of the Liao dynasty because it was compiled 200 years after the fall of the Liao and also it was based on practically no material so often people say I'll go into the Liao dynasty such and such except you have to be very careful when you're using the Liao dynasty but getting back for a minute to the second script we already had a script and five years later we had to believe the Liao history here we have this what do you call it, this inscription we were going to message this came to the court but there was no one who could understand their language the emperor said to the emperor who was his brother was clever, he may be sent to welcome them by being in their company for 20 days he may be able to learn their spoken language and script I repeat he was with them for 20 days and he learned their spoken language and script, eat your hearts out would be would be modern scholars of script-languages there's a great quotation about Peleo that wasn't meant to be funny but I found it funny that when he was out looting during the war he got caught in Kashgar or something like that because his luggage was somewhere and so in his obituary on what everyone said Peleo learned Kashgari, Turkic while he was waiting for his luggage he got 20 minutes so you have these wonderful stories about Lingmus he then created a number of smaller ketone characters which although fewer in number fewer in number covered everything generally except the date 925 that is if we had to believe this just five years later but it is more than a century before the earliest extant inscription in other words we've got a story that in 925 he went and learned Uyghur in 20 days it sounds like one of these books you buy in the farmer language bookshop in a month or a week Uyghur in a fortnight or whatever it was so there's some sort of a problem going on here because the question is why would they do it if you've already got a script but then somebody comes along with a much easier script why would you want to keep two of them one would normally think that you'd use the simplest script which has about 400 probably some of this about 380 characters end because it's very easy to learn more comparatively speaking and it's very easy to write and so on and so on but the ketones still maintained the earliest script and used both of them to choose right throughout the dynasty right on the end of the dynasty they used both scripts and I'll give you an example of what both scripts looked like and you'll see they don't really look anything like each other oh they all look very Chinese but they're very okay this is very elegant just an example of something to say this is a ketones small script a bronze mirror you can see it's really terribly elegant it's a lot of script and it was written normally in this sort of crazy sort of first imperial script oh yes this is the one I was telling mentioning about the discovery of at one time this was the only inscription that people had of any sort of ketones then this priest came along and he found one inscription at the bottom of a grave and the reason the peasants haven't stolen it was too bloody heavy but you know they worked off everything they could find but you know a couple of tons of stuff in some language nobody could read it was hardly worth the trouble anyway he turned up with a whole lot of people who made a and he had them dangling by ropes over the grave which was a couple of meters down and none of them knew how to make rubbing so they had to copy it and all of you of course have tried to copy things in languages which you don't know very well so you tend to get them wrong and anyway it got wrong but it was something at least then afterwards the son of a sort of a warlord, a military commissioner or something also looted some royal tombs and put them in his garden sort of like garden gnomes or something like this but they eventually found their way into museums and so on in China so by the 30s now by the 40s you always say 40s, 50s the Chinese had five fairly substantial inscriptions that's the two for the Empress in English and not in English in Chinese in China and two others for the Empress and this one now there's something which I wasn't going to mention but one of my friends who was looking at this said ah you know a bit of historical what human sort of what would I say addition to this because there was a good deal of bad blood going on between this particular priest and another priest and then this one bought this but then he sold it to somebody else and so on and on but there's something else which is very quite interesting about the cultural revolution maybe it says cultural revolution but it did have its rather interesting aspects and one was towards the end of the cultural revolution the intellectuals or officials were sent to the countryside to learn from the peasants and so on and so on so they basically had nothing to do and two people in Beijing used their time to make up little slips of the key down the inscriptions so slips are what they are they're sort of bits of paper so you would say there was this particular key down letter and it appears before this one and after that one and this took something like three or four years nowadays it would take a computer three minutes or something but this is how they started doing it because they had nothing to do except to mute themselves with the key down scripts so the cultural revolution had certain advantages for them anyway after the cultural revolution in those days it's a bit complicated because you may remember those if you were around at the time was that everything was done collectively so if this was written by ABCDE it was written by so-and-so collectively so you're never quite sure who had done what because now you can work out because people are writing their memoirs and so on and so on in any case in 1985 was the second major breakthrough in the key down script which is in a reconstruction created with the key down syllables now this is quite interesting something I found that was an alphabetic script because we didn't have time to go into it but this is not an alphabetic script it's syllabic you know now I'm pretty sure that if you look at Ventress and the Disappointment of linear B you find that he invented the idea of a grid for himself I'm pretty sure he didn't know anything about Japanese but grids are really quite important for this sort of language I think I hope the next one I didn't write there's somebody copied something that I did but it doesn't matter you can see this so you've got three O's and three U's and here you've got but here you've got four missing and here you've got six missing but here you've got a certain number missing now what you would expect of what the linguist used to call comparative what was it called? Comparative of something that all of these would have something written in them so there are still quite a few characters that we don't know what they are but there's a fair bit that they're fitting to one of these categories here just that we haven't quite worked out what particular little hole what particular little square they're into now this is from the tomb of the first emperor and again if you're just looking at Chinese but then when you look at it you say well yeah sort of Chinese but that's jungle it appears to be jungle but this is what could be jungle and this is our shoe but it's missing something and that looks like one but with a big thing I want this looks like chun but it doesn't have a line so it has a hole so although it looks very much like Chinese characters but different so this is the large script this is the script that the Chinese invented for them invented for the emperor so I've just written here this is a remnant of the last script and now of course because for different reasons the Chinese government won't let the Chinese archaeological departments explore open imperial tombs so even though they can explore around the tombs in front of the tombs at the side of the tombs peripheral tombs all sorts of tombs they can't actually get inside the imperial tombs themselves so almost certainly inside the imperial tombs would be lots of other lots of other inscriptions written in Ketan but we can't get hold of them at the moment and they've tried all sorts of things to do it now this is a much bigger example of the large script and again if we look at it we say oh yeah Chinese but for those of you who know Chinese you'll see that practically there are some things which look as if they might be Chinese or which are Chinese but they don't make too much sense so I can't push but you can see them for yourself here this one looks like Liang meaning two but it doesn't have the line at the top this one we don't know what it is this one means country but it doesn't have a little dot on it this one is the one which we just saw looks like 20 N looks like the word for spring that's got a fire instead of you know the three lines again the next one is something which looks like elder brother even if you put all that together it still doesn't make the slightest bit of sense so those of you who are Chinese your first reaction upon is oh it's Chinese but then you look at it more carefully and you say huh whatever it is it's sort of pretty weird Chinese and then the next thing you'll say no it's not Chinese but it looks like Chinese anyway that's a large script and then this is the small script which you can see is quite a different little affix this is a large script again it's what looks vaguely Chinese but you can see that each character is made up of a certain number of smaller characters so that one has got four that one has got four, that one has got two that one has got five, that one has got two that one has got one, that one has got two these are syllables so in other words a script is a syllabic script which means this is why it is much easier to work it out because once you work out this is I for example which can either be father or it can be year once you work out a certain number of them lots of things it's sort of like inspired guesswork sometimes you know that he respected he something very much what did he respect very much well maybe it was your grandfather or maybe it was your grandfather maybe it was your uncle or maybe it was your emperor but eventually you work out and paint his father and so it's by this sort of guesswork I suppose that people but the whole point of this is to see that there are two quite distinct scripts so if you look at the one first and I said you know the large script it looks like Chinese this also looks sort of like Chinese but even less Chinese than the other one does this one doesn't really look Chinese and this one is supposed to be the other story by the way about the other problem possibility that according to this story about the guy learning Uighur in 20 days is all very well except that no known script of the Uighurs or anybody else looks anything like that and the Uighurs used to have four scripts and the Uighurs were sort of very literate people they knew Chinese, they knew Arabic and they knew all sorts of varieties of Turkic and so on but none of the scripts of the Uighurs knew look anything like that so the question is where did the script come from well at the moment the answer is nobody knows maybe somebody just made it up but it's one of the big questions we are waiting for moving on a little bit because partly I'm at more because you know that's rather sort of abstract sort of stuff this is quite interesting because again nobody knows what it is people guess it's got something to do with some sort of a funerary you know place where the Emperor's coffin may have been laid until he was formally buried in a tomb or what have you but it's completely open anybody can go there and take their picture there and stand on top of it or whatever they want this is about the large states they say the large script is seeing civil small and abing states have been subdued in an extremely employed many Chinese who taught them how to write by altering characters in the clerical script heading here and cutting there they created a script of civil thousand characters replacing the so they created a script with civil thousand characters the large script and along comes this prince who creates a script with about 400 characters but what do the Q-tons do they say oh well that's very nice but we'll still use the one with civil thousand characters in which is a bit hard to sort of fathom just what's going on okay this was quite a big discovery quite recently three or four years ago of the large cursive script if you think that these scripts are bad enough at least they look as if they're legible this doesn't even look as if it's legible and the reason is because this is a cursive variety of the large script and this was discovered by a young Russian who was an expert on the CCR language and people knew that there was a book it's about 200 and something oh there was a book in some language which nobody knew what it was so they just put it in some pile of rubbish there and then he was going through this pile of stuff and he sort of looked at it and he realized that the date on it was a Q-ton date and he couldn't have discovered that you know five years earlier because we didn't know what the dates looked like but now we know what the dates look like and he said Portia Morta whatever he said you know this is a you know this is written in the large script on the other hand by Russians being Russians everyone scholars being scholars they haven't published it yet they only published the first page because of course they want to translate it themselves before they publish it this way it's going to take you know 200 years or something before sort of like the Dead Sea Scrolls I think they probably took a rather long time to do a work out of the Dead Sea Scrolls one of my last I guess I'll just make some notes of this going on this is also another even though you might think there's a pretty recognized sort of field that nobody could possibly be interested actually it's quite a lot of bubbling going on not necessarily you know all discoveries but that's very interesting this professor called Bloch once were Bloch he's an Arabist he's a specialist in medieval Arabic which you might think is about you know there's nothing to do with Qida and it has nothing to do with Qida but he was doing a very detailed modern edition of a Arab geographer or an Arab who's not only a geographer he sort of wrote about everything one of the things he was interested in is how different people denote the time you know do they have 12 hours a day or do they have 25 hours a day or do they have 10 days a week or you know all that sort of thing and when he's travelling around he's designed in this particular place they use the 12 animals to designate time and this is how they pronounce it and this particular place they use the 12 animals to designate time and this is how they pronounce it and then he came across something which he couldn't quite work out because about half of them were mongrel and the other half where he had no idea but then he had a sort of an inspiration so he wrote to me and he said what do you think they are and I said my god or whatever Australia is for bogeymoi you know what's the spirit of bogeymoi it doesn't matter it only was like I think I'm not very decent you know what he had discovered by accident were the Qida and words of the 12 animals which was not what anybody was expecting but what is exciting about this is that what people had reconstructed from within the language itself the 12 animals they already had 11 so now we know all 12 animals but again to quote our friend Nishita you know you think you've understood something and then you realise you haven't that there is one word for moori which everybody thought if anything is accurate in this sort of stuff there is a mongolian word for horse and it's M something R something so it's R, mongolian word for horse but then some people thought there's something wrong here because there's also a Turkish title called irigan which is ayar so it's not arayatayar and then people wrote to and fro about this but what this fellow found out is that the mongolian the Qida word for horse is not moori but it's re re and some people reconstructed from within the language so even though it looked like mongolian and some people thought yeah maybe, maybe not this guy was able to show through the writings of some 11th century Arab geographer who wrote down what he heard and the other thing that got me terribly excited was the word haradas because haradas is the word for tiger in this in the 12 animals and it looks like nothing because the mongolian word is both and the main shul word or the geochul word is tasqa harada but harada of course is the same as kan which is kan so alas means something that maybe it's a taboo word which means something like king of the animals and why did they have a taboo word maybe because the tiger was a taboo amongst certain keytons or maybe all keytons or what have you so that's why we have this very strange word not only it's tested in texts from the far north east of China but also from what is now Kazakhstan or this sort of place so you know it's just again if you like detective novels you know something which appears to have no relevance whatsoever but it's just in the background there you know it's just not as really a bit okay this is just a little illustration of a boy about how old is he, seven, eight I suppose and this little story from a Chinese ambassador when Chinese children so when keytons children first learn to read they first invert the order of the words in accordance with the language when I was serving as ambassador at the Jin State my companion was Wang Paul and he gave me an example of keytons that made me laugh for example when they read Yao Suo Ji Zhong Shuo Song Qing Yao Yue Xia Man a bird rest on a tree in the middle of a pond the monk beats the door under the moon they say moon bright in monk door hits water bottom in tree on on crow sits, something like that so he thought this is weird you know but of course anybody who knows about these things says ah I'll take this can be translated word for word into Mongolian so it was quite clear about what sort of grammar the language had but the Chinese sort of didn't tweak to this because they didn't they thought they just translated literally so birds sit on bridge or whatever rather than anyway that's a little picture of a tomb which is a little boy learning how to how to learn his keytons whatever happened to the keytons and a lot of popular books about this because as we saw from the second slide it was a very very large area in a very very powerful country but it disappeared there just aren't any keytons anymore what happened to them and nobody really knows with a few theories around the place one of which is the Dagwars now the Dagwars are a special lot of people who speak a Mongolian type language but they're surrounded with Tungus type languages in other words it's a very aberrant sort of Mongolian language but amongst their creation myth or amongst their national myth or what have you there are two versions to do with the keytons one is that they are descended from the keytons the other is that they are always been Dagwars but after the civil wars and so on with the refugees fleeing after the genuine invasion and so on and so on very large numbers of keytons took refuge in that area which is up near Siberia somewhere in the middle of power but nobody really knows this is just you know sort of what you know people talk about so nobody could prove it then I'm sure everybody's amazement 15, 20 years ago news got out that a group of people in Yunnan which about as far away from the Dagwars as you could get and saw me in China claimed that they were descended from the keytons and in fact they were the 15th generation of a particular keyton general called Usuru who had come to that area with the Mongol armies of Genghis Khan so it's well known that in Yunnan there are civil groups of Mongols, real Mongols who do their Mongolian thing with you know wrestling and archery and so on and so on so various experts went after this place and they weren't particularly interested in their claims but they wanted to know what their language was like and their language was nothing like it should be because it should be a sort of Altaic language and it was more like a Southeast Asian like Thai or this sort of this sort of language so the thing just stayed there the question just stayed there until ten years ago when a tomb was discovered, excavated and there was the body of a woman there which was usually they cremated their bodies and put them in pots or what have you and nobody people immediately said ah shaman must be some sort of shaman and it probably is some sort of shaman but the keytons had a particular role in society of somebody called the red woman and what exactly the red woman did was sort of not exactly a shaman who would jump up and down and talk to the spirits but sort of give advice when necessary and she would sit in a corner and every now and then she'd say this is what I think that doesn't matter, what does matter is that she was a genuine keyton and that there was enough DNA in her body to be able to identify her as a keyton so to cut a long story short they then compared the DNA with the Yuna knot and the DNA with the Dago knot and they found indeed that it was a much higher proportion of DNA than one would expect in those groups so it doesn't really prove anything but it gives a very good indication of that there's something in it this story and it's just a very quick minute very recently a week or so ago I got an invitation to attend a conference on keytons studies in Yuna the keytons studies in Yuna and it turns out to be sponsored by the Yuna whatever it is Tourism Bureau so they want to come and have a look at a genuine keyton or something anyway I'd particularly want to go to China in January but there's still something bubbling away there possibly that was the red lady that was what I just said there keyton large script we talked about that already this is the area where the imperial tombs are and so for those of you into Feng Shui that's more as it is, it's a natural sort of barrier and in the old days of course there was a guard a heroic fortified gate there but it was because the whole thing fell apart at the end of the Qing Dynasty that the peasants and anybody else could go in there anyway it was a very beautiful area that is what a tomb looks like I should say the entrance to a tomb looks like as you can see it's dug into the side of the mountainside and do you know how people find these things by the way is your imagination Ray Roberts because they're very good they're very good at this sort of thing and over the many lunches I've had in that part of the world one was quite, well many were quite amazing but one had to do with a I think it was the head of police the head of the archeological bureau Ray Roberts and so anyway they were the best of mates because anyway you can imagine you're all that one what I'm pushing to a button oh yeah that's another one and as you can see you dig into the the mountainside and there's a door this is a rather upmarket sort of death of ask socracy it's very strange they would cremate their dead but then they would have ordered mannequins they would have wooden statues and then they'd put the ashes of the person inside the water statues and then they'd put the clothing of the person there and put a death mask on his face it's not amazing so they were able to reproduce a general appearance of what the person looked like whereas he was really he was really you know cremated and inside a little you know that's a very very elegant I bought a copy of that I don't know 100 Yuan or something I'm very happy with it that's my own version of Memento Bori you know okay this is just an interesting little map Liao is sort of all over the place but these areas which you see are dots are where people were found to and you can see this is Nanjing which is the Beijing which is just beneath the Great Wall anyway you can see there's quite a lot of archaeological activity going on there if you look at that carefully you won't make any sense of it because this again is in the large script has been copied by somebody and again it looks pretty much as if it were Chinese except it doesn't make any sense and a lot of characters look like Chinese like I don't know so it's still one of those still one of those mysteries of the script this one because this talk was going to be much longer on stage then but that is an example of the Jurchen script that I mentioned from time to time and as you can see it's sort of rather similar to the Kieda large script but not really this media which is also anyway that some of the characters are the same as other scripts most of the characters aren't which is a question of where did this come from where did the Kieda large script come from where did all these scripts come from and again getting back to my friend Yoha he said you know there's a possibility that this might be translatable he came up with another idea that this is a sort of a colloquial non-official way of writing Chinese under the non-Chinese short hand sort of thing something unusual of any women's writing and so on and so on but that's purely a guess on his part still nobody knows where all these scripts look like this is on the out of suburbs I suppose of the capital city the capital city was called Shangjing, the supreme capital and now it's called Suoling Baqi and every now and then you see something which happens to be to have survived that's another one, I suspect he may have been knocked down and he's been put up again this one if you look over on somebody's worked it out there's a rather confused and not very pleased amateur archaeologists they're sort of doing this and the reason I'm not very happy is you can see what the earth is like it's sort of pretty muddy and so the mud had sort of got into my shoes and was all squishing away and but if you want to be an archaeologist that's what you have to do apparently and there I was I can't remember if that was a pattern and there's me and a couple other people standing on what is left of the city wall of the Shangjing and it's not really very big in fact it's the size of a football ground or something probably smaller so I wasn't a big capital city by any means okay, 10 cents for anybody who can guess what that is you're obviously rich I'll show you what it used to look like until about 1920 something what do you think that is it's a statue of Guanyin but what happened during the Russian Civil War a lot of white Russian soldiers were taking refuge in that area they were bought out of their vines and probably quite drunk and so they used the head of Guanyin as rifle practice so they spent their days shooting off her head and so you got this rather obscure looking bit of stone and it's only that somebody happened to keep a a picture dating from 1920 something which which looks like just another picture of what the kittens look like I rather like this guy to another main looking guy that you wouldn't want to tangle with this is what the inside of the tomb looks like or the tombs remember you said this is the door and you open the door and you go inside I've got a better picture here but this is the tomb stone with an inscription on it and this is you know just some decoration and what have you I rather like her just because I like her she's sort of you know terribly conscientious and terribly busy and she says some sort of I don't know or something now isn't this just the most wonderful thing you've ever seen it looks like somebody had a jolly good party and didn't clean up and so sort of closed the door and what have you but that's when they opened the door that's what they found and it really does look as if it was last night's party and if we look underneath the table we can see again the tombstone that has around of the 12 zodiacal animals and you can't see very clearly on this one but basically the tombstones there's something like this one probably not very important a bit less than a meter maybe 0.8 of a meter and you have the inscription saying this is so and so and you know he was the son of such and such and he married so and so and they had six children they did this and all that can be understood because it's all pretty all pretty stereotyped I suppose you know but then we get to the real ketone bit of what exactly he did and then nobody can understand it which almost lead to the conclusion of this talk but that's rather nice you see of this party of I know what are they all of do you think or something like that this is a little shimmer thing these are watermelons which the deceased with him to the grave and this I rather like because we used to talking about Mongolian hotpot there's a picture of a ketone hotpot so I'm running a sort of a little campaign at the moment to have it renamed a ketone hotpot and you also notice by the way their crazy haircuts and they all look like that they've all got their hair cut at the top sort of tangling down the front on the side I put here the last ketone I don't know what to put the extra slides I just mentioned about these people in Yunnan this ship might be dead by now because this picture is about 20 years old but this is the patriarch of the Yunnan ketones who claims to be a direct descendant of a particular ketone general and that's why they're now holding something sponsored by the tourism bureau of Yunnan or whatever it is okay we'll leave it at that stage I'm a quarter of an hour overdue we can have Q I don't know if you're going to get too many A or not but we can try