Wen Jing reports. On December 1, 2022, the Department of Ancient and Medieval History, IWH, and the Center for Comparative Studies of Ancient Civilizations, Chinese Academy of History invited Bojun Sun, senior research fellow of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences to give a lecture on the writing systems of the Western Xia Dynasty, the Liao Dynasty, and the Jurchen Jin Dynasty in the North of ancient China.
In the lecture, Bojun Sun introduces the invention and the morphology of the Tangut script, the Khitan script, and the Jurchen script, respectively. She concludes that the conception of these scripts emphasized their cultural representation. They are designed as a symbol of the political power of the dynasty. All three dynasties used Chinese characters to model their own writing systems. It was the result of the strong influence of the Confucian culture in the northern areas of ancient China.
Bojun Sun discusses the methods of deciphering these scripts and promotes a new possibility to decipher the Khitan script through the analysis of the rhymes of poetic inscriptions.
