The wide and full-flowing Ili River carries its waters to Lake Balkhash, taking in numerous tributaries along its 800-kilometer course and dividing Semirechye into eastern and western, left-bank and right-bank parts. For many centuries the Ili was a difficult-to-overcome barrier on the migration routes of tribes and peoples, serving as a natural boundary of their settlement in the lands of southeastern Kazakhstan. Having mastered the horse for riding, the nomads overcame the water element and made the Ili passable, and the fords and crossings that connected its banks in the middle reaches acquired great importance in the economic, cultural, political and military history of the region. Possession of them ensured dominance over the main highways that ran through Semirechye to the oases of Central Asia, to the Issyk-Kul region and the Inner Tien Shan, and on to China and Central Asia. At the approach to the Taukum, Moiynkum and Saryesik-Atyrau sands that surround the Ili delta, where the riverbed forms a deep and narrow rocky canyon – Kapshagai – the three main crossings of the western part of Semirechye are concentrated, known since the 19th century under the names of Usharal, Tamgaly-Otel and Kyz-Otel (the Ili crossing). In the middle part of the canyon, at the Tamgalytas tract, which lies below the ford of the same name, at the very foot of the Tamgalyzhar cliff that rises on the right bank of the river, stands a remarkable monument of monumental art and epigraphy of the 17th–18th centuries – Tamgalytas (Tamgaly-Tas, or Tamgaly-Tash). The history of its discovery and study goes back more than a hundred years.
One of the first mentions of the historic Tamgalytas site in Russian sources is contained in an 1848 document relating to the correspondence between the sultans and biys of the Middle and Senior Zhuz and the administration of the Ayaguz Outer District and the bailiff attached to the Kirghiz (Kazakhs) of the Great Horde. Defending the Middle Zhuz Kazakhs’ rights of ownership of the summer and winter pastures on the right-bank side of the Ili, the administrators of the Naiman clan divisions presented their evidence: “On the Ili there stands the famous Tamgaly-Tash stone, on which Ablai Khan and Sultan Abulfeiz placed a tamga (a signature mark, or a mark used in place of a brand) to certify that the far side (the left bank – auth.) must belong to the Uysun people, and this side to the Naiman volosts.” Unfortunately, the signs or inscriptions on the rocks of Tamgalytas mentioned in the document have not yet been found, but the very fact of such an early mention of the locality, as a place of note well known among the Kazakhs of Semirechye, deserves attention. It is no coincidence that the first scholar to visit Tamgalytas specifically for scientific purposes, in 1856, was Ch. Ch. Valikhanov, whose oral accounts and sketches of individual inscriptions with images later prompted P. P. Semyonov to undertake a trip to the Ili Kapshagai in 1857 before setting out on his second journey to the Tien Shan. The drawings made more than 150 years ago by Ch. Ch. Valikhanov and the artist P. M. Kosharov captured the landscapes of the Ili Kapshagai near the Tamgalytas ford and convey the appearance of the monument at the moment of its discovery.
In the second half of the 19th century, Tamgalytas was repeatedly visited by various travelers, scholars and local historians of Semirechye. The most valuable information about the monument is contained in the manuscript notes of K. A. Larionov and in the short articles of F. V. Poyarkov, N. N. Pantusov, as well as of the famous Russian Mongol scholar A. M. Pozdneev. The survey of Tamgalytas was carried out by N. N. Pantusov in 1897 on the instructions of the Imperial Archaeological Commission; the materials he forwarded to St. Petersburg (photographs and paper copies) were later studied by A. M. Pozdneev, who for the first time translated most of the inscriptions and explained the Buddhist images. Thanks to this reading of the texts, one of which mentions the name of the 4th Panchen Lama Lobsan Choizhi Zhalsan (1570–1662), Tamgalytas was identified as a monument of Tibetan Buddhism and given a relatively late dating – no earlier than the mid-17th century. However, the reasons for its emergence and the history of the Lamaist cult complex remained unclear until recently. Only in 2008-2009 did an expedition of the Kazakh Research Institute for Problems of the Cultural Heritage of Nomadic Civilizations (led by I. V. Yerofeyeva, with B. Zh. Aubekerov and A. E. Rogozhinsky), with the participation of the Mongol scholar N. S. Yakhontova (Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences) and the art historian Yu. I. Elikhina (the State Hermitage Museum), carry out a comprehensive (historical, archaeological, geographical and geomorphological, historical-toponymic, art-historical and linguistic) study of Tamgalytas, which made it possible to reveal the historical context of the emergence and long functioning of the Lamaist complex in the Ili Kapshagai.
The earliest mention of the Khabtsagai/Kapshagai tract on the Ili River is found in Radnabhadra’s “Biography of Zaya Pandita”, in the description of the events of the internecine war between the Oirat rulers Ochirtu Setsen Khan and Galdan Khong Taiji in 1676–1677. In the historical and geographical writings of Chinese authors of the mid-18th – first half of the 19th century, the Ili Kapshagai, as an area on the northeastern edge of Sharabel (the Sarytaukum sands on the left bank of the Ili), was designated by the Mongolian toponym “Tamga” (Temukha, or Tamukha).
The history of the formation of the Tamgalytas complex is closely connected with the era of the highest military-political might and cultural flourishing of the Dzungar Khanate (1635-1757), which was accompanied by the intensive spread of the Lamaist form of Buddhism among the Western Mongolian tribes – the Oirats.
The natural landscape of the tract played the decisive role in choosing the site and organizing the space of the cult complex; its dominant feature is a rocky massif at the foot of which images and inscriptions from different periods are concentrated on 15 separate boulders. Based on the iconography of the depicted figures, the paleography of the texts and the technique of their execution, four stages in the formation of the complex can be distinguished.
At the first stage, an ensemble was created that included images of Buddha Shakyamuni, the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara in the form of a “one-faced and four-armed” deity, and Buddha Bhaisajyaguru with accompanying Tibetan inscriptions on the central panel (plane No. 4), a figure of Buddha Nageshvararaja (No. 2), as well as various prayer texts, including two mantras of Buddha Manjushri, whose image is absent from the monument, an address to the Panchen Lama Choizhi Zhalsan (No. 11) and four six-syllable mantras “omma ni padme hum” carved on different rocks around the periphery of the rock pile (No. 1, 5, 13, 16).
The second stage in the formation of the cult complex is associated with the creation of ten identical texts of the six-syllable mantra, executed in the Oirat “clear script” (No. 10, 13–15, 17). Simultaneously or slightly earlier, the pictorial array of the sanctuary was supplemented with an image of Buddha Amitabha (No. 10), around which a new cycle of Tibetan epigraphy later took shape.
At the third stage, a mantra dedicated to Amitabha appeared next to his image, and on different facets of the nearby rocks – a series of Tibetan inscriptions, including the six-syllable mantra repeated three times (No. 7, 9, 10), the inscription “…Glory to the lama of the good mind… knowledge and mercy…”, addressed to Buddha Shakyamuni (No. 8), as well as two mantras of Manjushri on the southern periphery of the sacred area (No. 17).
The final, fourth stage of the formation of the complex was the creation of the longest text in Tamgalytas, reproduced in 11 lines in the cursive “clear script” (No. 11); in N. S. Yakhontova’s modern translation the text contains a thankful address to the Buddhas and the bodhisattva depicted here for “the overcoming of danger [ranging] from disease to famine” (Oirat. zuda; Kaz. jut) and the wish to attain “in this land a beautiful tranquility, lasting and unceasing”.
The most probable date for the emergence of the early images and inscriptions in Tamgalytas is the period from December 1676 to March 1677 – the time when the nomadic camp (urge) of Galdan Khong Taiji (years of life 1644 – 1697) stayed in the Ili Kapshagai, after his sole power had been effectively established in Dzungaria and on the eve of his official investiture on June 30, 1678 by the Dalai Lama Lobsang Gyatso with the title of Galdan Tenzin Boshogtu Khan (“the Blessed Khan of the Faith, Pillar of the Teaching”). The personal involvement of the new Dzungar ruler in the creation of the sanctuary is confirmed by the presence here of an image of the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, whose emanation, from 1660 onwards, was considered to be the Great Fifth Dalai Lama (1635-1682), as well as by a dedicatory inscription bearing the name of the high-ranking Tibetan hierarch Choizhi Zhalsan – Galdan’s spiritual mentor, under whose guidance he received a theological education in Tibet over the course of 12 years. The establishment in Tibetan iconography of the image of the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara-Shadakshari in the form of a “one-faced and four-armed” deity, represented in Tamgalytas, dates to the 1660s; in the territory of the Dzungar Khanate this canonical image began to be reproduced in painting, sculpture and monumental art no earlier than the last quarter of the 17th century, with the establishment of Lamaism among the Oirats.
Galdan’s creation, on the riverside cliffs of the Ili, of an impressive panorama combining the images of the most venerated deities of the Tibetan pantheon served as a political manifestation of unswerving loyalty to the teachings of Tsongkhapa and of readiness for their active spread in the northwestern part of Central Asia. The choice of the site for the Buddhist sanctuary was determined by the expressive qualities of the picturesque landscape and by its location near one of the main river crossings of the Ili Kapshagai.
The pictorial array of the Tamgalytas sanctuary took its final shape during the first two stages, no later than the first half of the 1680s. In this period the Kapshagai tract, with its three river crossings of the Ili, acquired particular importance in connection with the large-scale campaigns of conquest undertaken by the Dzungar rulers in Southern Kazakhstan and Central Asia. For more than half a century the area of the Ili Kapshagai remained a pivotal point of the Oirats’ interregional communications, and the fords across the Ili played an important role in the political integration of the Oirat tribes and in the spread of the Buddhist teaching across the territory of the Dzungar Khanate.
Worship by the Buddhist Oirats continued during the next stage of the sanctuary’s functioning, which covers the reigns of Khong Taiji Tsewang Rabtan (1698 – 1727), Galdan Tseren (1727 – 1745) and their successors, characterized by the undisputed dominance of the Gelugpa school in the religious and spiritual life of the nomadic Oirats and by the wide adoption among them of their own script – “todo bichig” (the clear script). A series of prayer inscriptions, executed with varying degrees of skill and addressed to the Buddhas Shakyamuni, Amitabha and Manjushri, records a stage of active visitation of the cult site. The appearance of the Mongolian toponym Tamga in the oral vocabulary of the Oirats of Semirechye should also be attributed to the same time; it came to designate the area where the sanctuary founded by Galdan Boshogtu Khan stood, as well as the adjacent territory, including the nearby ford across the Ili. Lamaist visits to the sanctuary ceased around 1758, after the fall of the Dzungar Khanate under the blows of the troops of Qing China and with the return of the Kazakh and Kyrgyz clans to the lands of Semirechye.
The final stage in the creation of the cult epigraphy of the Tamgalytas sanctuary is connected with the culminating episode of the “last great migration” of the Volga Kalmyk Torguts, led by Ubashi Khan in 1771 from the bounds of Russia to the lands of the former Dzungar Khanate. Having crossed the Yaik River in mid-January 1771, the Kalmyks advanced across the lands of Kazakhstan for six months, almost continuously fighting off attacks by the armed detachments of the Kazakhs of the Junior Zhuz, and then by the united militia of the three Zhuzes led by Khan Nuraly and Sultans Ablai and Abulfeiz.
More than 20 monuments of Tibetan Buddhism of the 17th – mid-18th century are known in Kazakhstan, among which modest sanctuaries predominate, such as the Kegen arasan, Taigak and others, with a monotonously replicated prayer formula “om mani pad mehum”. Monuments of monumental art, such as the Kelenshiktas stone suburgan in the town of Tekeli, are few in Semirechye and Eastern Kazakhstan. The image of Amitabha and the early inscriptions of Tamgalytas show a similarity with individual monuments of northern Kyrgyzstan (Yssyg-Ata, Tamga), which are also connected with the early period of the spread of Tibetan Buddhism among the Oirat tribes. However, neither in the composition of the characters of the Tibetan pantheon represented in Tamgalytas, nor in the number of texts – different in content and language – does the monument in the Ili Kapshagai have any analogues in the western part of Central Asia. Tamgalytas stands out markedly for its artistic expressiveness, the variety of its epigraphic texts and the length of the period over which they were created, which reflects the special significance of the sanctuary on the bank of the Ili River in the era of its emergence and functioning.
