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The Tangut script (Tangut: 𗼇𘝞; Chinese: 西夏文; pinyin: Xī Xià Wén; lit. 'Western Xia script') is a logographic writing system, formerly used for writing the extinct Tangut language of the Western Xia dynasty. According to the latest count, 5863 Tangut characters are known, excluding variants. [1]
This list of Tangut books comprises a list of manuscript and xylograph texts that are written in the extinct Tangut language and Tangut script.These texts were mostly produced within the Western Xia dynasty (1038–1227) during the 12th and 13th centuries, and include Buddhist sutras and explanatory texts, dictionaries and other philological texts, as well as translations of Chinese books and ...
Mid 14th century Tangut Buddhist text inscribed on the inner wall of the Cloud Platform at Juyong Pass near Beijing. The earliest modern identification of the Tangut script occurred in 1804 when a Chinese scholar called Zhang Shu (Chinese: 張澍; pinyin: Zhāng Shù, 1781–1847) observed that the Chinese text of a Chinese-Tangut bilingual inscription on a stele known as the Liangzhou Stele ...
When opened up, the dimensions of the print area of each folio are 30.7 mm × 38.0 mm. The book title and page number are printed on the central fold of each folio, with the page numbers written in either Tangut or Chinese or a mixture of Tangut and Chinese. Each half-folio comprises ten vertical lines of 22 Tangut characters. [5]
These documents date to the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368), and are written in various languages, including Chinese, Tibetan, and Old Uyghur. The documents also include over two hundred fragments of texts written in the Tangut language, which is significant as the Tangut script (devised in 1036) is entirely absent from the Library Cave documents. [3]
Modern research into the Tangut languages began in the late 19th century and early 20th century when S. W. Bushell, Gabriel Devéria, and Georges Morisse separately published decipherments of a number of Tangut characters found on Western Xia coins, in a Chinese–Tangut bilingual inscription on a stele at Wuwei, Gansu, and in a copy of the Tangut translation of the Lotus Sutra.
The Western Xia was a Tangut-led Chinese dynasty which ruled over what are now the northwestern Chinese subdivisions of Ningxia, Gansu, eastern Qinghai, northern Shaanxi, northeastern Xinjiang, southwest Inner Mongolia, and southernmost Outer Mongolia from 1032 until 1227 when they were destroyed by the Mongols.
The original book consists of 37 xylograph folios in concertina format. The preface is identical content written in both Chinese and Tangut. From the sentence "How can you mix with foreigners without learning foreign words, How can you be counted amongst the Han without learning Han words" (不學番言，則豈和番人之眾；不會漢語，則豈入漢人之數) it is clear that the book ...