An alphabet on wood, leather, and bone
In the oasis region of Khwarazm, south of the Aral Sea, a unique writing system flourished for centuries. Known as the Khwarazmian script, it was used to write the now-extinct Khwarazmian language, an Eastern Iranian tongue related to Sogdian. The script's earliest appearances date to the late 2nd century CE, found on coins of the region's rulers. Its use continued until the 8th century CE, when it was gradually replaced by the Arabic alphabet following the Islamic conquest of Central Asia.
The script is an abjad, a writing system that indicates consonants only, leaving the reader to infer the vowels. It is written from right to left and developed from the Imperial Aramaic alphabet, which was widely used for administrative purposes in the Achaemenid Empire. The Khwarazmian alphabet consists of 21 letters derived from Aramaic. Two main styles of the script have been identified: a non-joining, monumental form used for inscriptions, and a joining cursive style used for documents.
Most surviving examples of Khwarazmian writing are short and administrative. Archaeologists working under S.P. Tolstov in 1938 at the palace-city of Toprak-Kala discovered an archive of over 100 documents. These texts, inked on wooden plates and leather rolls, are primarily economic records from the palace. Some of these documents bear precise dates from the early 3rd century CE, establishing a timeline for the script's use. Other examples have been found on ossuaries—bone boxes used in Zoroastrian burial practices—from the site of Tok-Kala, as well as on silver vessels and pottery shards.
The slow process of decipherment
The Khwarazmian language and its script present considerable challenges to scholars. The language itself is sparsely attested, known only from its Middle Iranian stage. After the 8th century, the language continued to be spoken for several hundred years and was sometimes written using a modified Arabic script, with the last known examples dating to the 14th century.
Deciphering the pre-Islamic script has been a slow process, advanced by linguists like Vladimir Livshits. The initial breakthroughs came from coin legends, which often included the names and titles of kings. A peculiar feature shared with other Aramaic-derived scripts is the use of heterograms, or logograms. These are Aramaic words written in the text that were intended to be read as their Khwarazmian equivalents. For example, the Aramaic word for king, MLK', would be written, but the reader would pronounce the Khwarazmian word for king.
The cursive script found on the wood and leather documents from Toprak-Kala is particularly difficult to read. While the content of these economic texts is largely understood, a full grasp of the grammar and vocabulary remains incomplete. No extensive literary or historical texts in the original Khwarazmian script have ever been found, leaving a fragmented picture of the society that used it. The Unicode block for the script, enabling its use in digital formats, was not added until 2020.