The Obituary
Tangut was the language of the Western Xia, a Buddhist empire that ruled northwestern China from the 11th to the 13th centuries. Its speakers created a logographic script of nearly 6,000 dense characters to record their literature and scriptures. When Genghis Khan’s Mongols destroyed Western Xia in 1227, the language lost its state, though it lingered in pockets for generations, likely dying out by the 16th century. A buried library unearthed at Khara-Khoto in 1908 rescued the language from total oblivion.
Worth remembering
- Its writing system had close to 6,000 characters, each more visually dense than Chinese, invented around 1036.
- A vast Tangut library was found preserved in the dead city of Khara-Khoto in the Gobi Desert in 1908.
Sources
- Tangut was the language of the Western Xia state, written in its own logographic script and extinct after the Mongol conquest. Wikipedia
- The Tangut script comprised nearly 6,000 complex characters created in the 11th century. Encyclopaedia Britannica
A graveyard tradition: leave a stone to show you came, and remembered.