Introduction, Part 2An Update on Deciphering the Kitan Language and Scripts Daniel Kane Until quite recently very little was known about the Kitan language. There was some material in the Liaoshi and other early sources, which could not be verified, and a few Kitan inscriptions excavated during the first half of the twentieth century, which could not be deciphered. Although a number of articles can, in retrospect, be seen to have some valid insights, little progress was made until the publication of Research on the Kitan Small Script (契丹小 字研究) in 1985.1 In the three decades since then, our knowledge of Kitan has grown appreciably, and a strong basis for future research has been established. The Liaoshi noted that the Kitans used two scripts, large and small, of which the first was devised with the help of Chinese in the employ of the Kitans, and is said to be based on a rearrangement of the elements of the Chinese clerical script. The second was devised by Diela, a brother of the emperor, after he had come into contact with the Uighur language and scripts. Any connection between the small script and any other known script remains obscure. The small script was called that because the graphs, “although small in number, covered everything.” Examples of what this meant in practice are given below. There were a number of Kitan words scattered throughout the Liaoshi, usually names or official titles, of which about forty basic words, plus a number of official titles, were gathered together in a glossary. Those words remained practically the only source of information on Kitan until recently. Of the forty basic words, about one-fifth are similar to Mongol. On this basis most scholars took it for granted Kitan was in some way related to Mongol, but there was little concrete evidence to establish such an affiliation. We can transcribe [End Page 11] whole inscriptions with a fairly high degree of accuracy, and if the language underlying the inscriptions were some form of proto-Mongol, the inscriptions should be relatively easy to read. But they are not. It has only been in recent years that a consensus seems to be emerging, based on the partial decipherment of the Kitan script, that Kitan can be considered a “paramongolic” language, a sort of cousin of proto-Mongol rather than being derived from it, both descending from an earlier source.2 Some scholars, however, prefer a more direct Mongol hypothesis. The first inscriptions in the Kitan small script were discovered by a Belgian priest, Fr. Louis Kervyn, in 1922 and published in 1923.3 In 1925 Haneda Tōru realised that the inscription on the 無字碑 Wuzibei (Stele with No Inscription) at Qingling near Xi’an was in the same script, making it a Kitan-Chinese bilingual. In 1930, the epitaphs for the emperor Daozong and his empress, Xuanyi, were also excavated. Working intensively, Chinese, Japanese, and Russian scholars tried to align parts of the Chinese texts with the Kitan texts, but it became clear that they were not translations of each other. Even in the case of the bilingual 郎君 Langjun inscription, as the inscription on the Stele with No Inscription is generally known, it proved very difficult to work out just what corresponded to what. Nevertheless, comparison of these different inscriptions made it possible to identify some dates, numerals, and some terms of the hexagenary cycle. These formed one of the bases for subsequent decipherment. The breakthrough came with the publication of Research on the Kitan Small Script (1985). The research group, made up of Chinggeltei, Liu Fengzhu, Chen Naixiong, Yu Baolin, and Xing Fuli, worked on eight texts and a few fragments. We can follow their general methodology by examining the bilingual Langjun inscription. [End Page 12] The Chinese text records that the younger brother of the emperor of the Great Jin Dynasty, who held the official titles of 都統 dutong (campaign commander), 經略 jinglüe (military commissioner), and 郎君 langjun (court gentleman), went hunting at 梁山 Liangshan. He arrived at the 乾陵 Qianling tombs of the Tang and was dismayed to see the buildings were dilapidated. He ordered the officials to repair them. Some time later he returned, was pleased with what he saw...