On the banks of the Orkhon river in central Mongolia stand two large inscribed stones, one raised in 732 for Kul Tigin and one in 735 for his brother Bilge Khagan. They are written in the Old Turkic runiform script, they are long, and they are cast as speech: the khagan addresses his people, his begs and his kinsmen, and tells them what happened and what they must not do again.
Nothing else like them exists for the early steppe. The written record of Inner Asia is otherwise almost entirely external, set down in Chinese, Persian, Arabic, Greek or Syriac by people describing nomads from outside and usually with a purpose. Here the ruler of a nomadic empire gives his own account of legitimacy, defeat, recovery and obligation, in his own language, on a monument his people would come to.
The Kul Tigin stone also carries a Chinese inscription, commissioned by the Tang emperor, on another face. The two texts do not say the same thing, and reading them together is one of the more instructive exercises in Inner Asian history. The Chinese face presents a client mourned by a benevolent court; the Turkic face presents a sovereign warning his people about that court. The stones were recorded by Russian and Finnish expeditions in the 1890s and the script was deciphered by Vilhelm Thomsen in 1893, which is when this voice became audible again after eleven centuries.