Kazakhstan's Ministry of Culture and Information has completed a project converting ancient Turkic inscriptions into digital format, making them accessible for use on computers and opening new avenues for scholarly research.
The resulting electronic corpus includes more than 300 inscriptions and tablets, among them the Orhon, Yenisey, Talas, and Turpan collections, according to Nepil Bazilhan of the ministry's Cultural Heritage Program.
Each entry in the digital archive contains historical background on the monuments, research commentary, original texts, Latin-alphabet transcriptions, Kazakh-language translations, photographs, facsimiles, reference criteria, and a dictionary.
Erden Kajibekov, who heads the ministry's Language Committee, said the project would give researchers and general readers broad access to the ancient written record.
Historical summary. TurkishPress restated this wire report, first published in January 2007, in its own words.