Irk Bitig

The manuscript is in the form of a booklet comprising 58 folios folded in half, each page being about 13.1 × 8.1 cm in size.

[1] The manuscript text is not precisely dated, but its colophon states that it was written on the 15th day of the second month of the year of the tiger at the Taygüntan (Chinese: 大雲堂; pinyin: Dàyúntáng) Manichaean monastery by an anonymous monk for his "elder brother", General İtaçuk (Saŋun İtaçuk).

[5] On the basis of its linguistic features, Marcel Erdal has dated the composition of the original work to the 8th and 9th centuries, among the earliest group of Old Turkic texts.

[6] The British Library manuscript exhibits a number of orthographic peculiarities that may reflect the dialect of its scribe.

The main text of the book comprises 65 sections, each representing a particular divination, which is headed by three groups of between one and four circles filled with red ink.

These three groups of circles are the omen (ırk in Old Turkic) that are the subject of the divination, and are thought to represent the pips on a four-sided dice made from a rectangular piece of wood that would be thrown three times (or three such dice thrown once) as part of the divination ceremony.

A couple of the omens show a threefold pattern of parallelism between two animals and a human: a white mare, a she-camel and a princess give birth (no.

[12] The Sky God Tengri is featured in some of the omens (no.12, 15, 17, 38, 41, 47, 54, 60), and he is normally shown to be benign, for instance rescuing lost or exhausted animals (nos.

Also featured is the god of the road, who bestows his favour on travellers (no.2), and mends old things and brings order to the country (no.48).

First two pages of the Irk Bitig (folios 5b and 6a).
Last two pages of the main text of Irk Bitig (folios 55b and 56a), partially overwritten with Buddhist verses in Chinese.
Omen 11 (4-4-3 dice) of the Irk Bitig (folio 13a): "There comes a messenger on a yellow horse (and) an envoy on a dark brown horse, bringing good tidings, it says. Know thus: (The omen) is extremely good." [ 8 ]