Hieroglyphics in China

Naxi hieroglyphics are so lifelike you can act them out. They’re known as the Dongba script (东巴文字 Dōngba wénzì) after the Dongba priests who use them. Unlike modern Chinese characters, where it sometimes takes a bit of imagination to see the imbedded pictographs, these glyphs are pretty easy to understand.

In Southwest China, scattered among the hills of the legendaryYunnanProvince, you’ll find the Naxi ethnic group. They’ve lived here for centuries and their written language is estimated to be somewhere around 1,000 years old.

Travelers inYunnantoday stop to marvel at the hieroglyphics painted on stone walls, written in town squares and found in shop windows. Some of these pictographs may be easy to interpret, but studying them indepth is another matter.

It took Austrian-American explorer Joseph Rock 24 years of field study to decipher their meanings.

In the first half of the 20th century, he lived with the Naxi, studying their language and painstakingly translating their manuscripts. He compiled an exhaustive 1,000-page long hieroglyphic dictionary.

Rock discovered that these hieroglyphics served an important, ritualistic function. When reciting prayers for a wedding or funeral, Naxi priests would tell ancient legends, and the glyph would act as a visual aid to their prayers or storytelling. In linguistics, we call this a mnemonic.

It might not be a fully-developed writing system, but these hieroglyphics provide insight into how other written scripts have changed over time.

Even though there has been a huge push in recent years for its revival and usage, the script has never been commonly used in day-to-day Naxi life. But it still remains active and viable, just as it is, serving an important function in religious rituals.

Characters meaning “to drink” and “to bite”, respectively.