Yukaghir Pictographic Letters from the Collection of the Russian Museum of Ethnography

Abstract

The Yukaghir pictography, letters on birch bark, so-called tos (lit. ‘birch bark’) includes letters of two types: those written by men, mostly descriptions of hunting routes, and those written by young women, mostly love letters. While the first type is quite widespread, the second one is very unusual, to the extent that researchers who deal with the history of writing have to single them out into a separate classification category. Almost everything that has been written on Yukaghir pictograms is based on the data collected by Samuil Shargorodskiy and Waldemar Jochelson in the 1890s in north-eastern Yakutia. The present publication introduces three toses of the first type (route maps) recently discovered in the collection of the Russian Museum of Ethnography in St Petersburg. The three toses were acquired by the museum in 1907 from Sergei Buturlin, a well-known ornithologist, together with a detailed commentary to the letters compiled by a member of the 1905 Kolyma expedition Ivan Shulga. The commentary is also published here.