Irk Bitig

The Irk Bitig, or Book of Omens, is a manuscript book on divination in Old Turkic, the only known complete manuscript text in the Old Turkic script. Aurel Stein found it in 1907 in the Library Cave of the Mogao Caves at Dunhuang, China, and it is now in the British Library in London. Its colophon says an anonymous monk wrote it in a year of the tiger at a Manichaean monastery; the manuscript is dated to the 9th or 10th century, and Marcel Erdal dated the original work to the 8th and 9th centuries. Each of its 65 sections gives an omen, thought to come from throws of a four-sided die, with a short story and a verdict of good or bad. It is an important source for early Turkic mythology.