How it began
The Soyombo script was designed in 1686 by Zanabazar (1635 to 1723), the first spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism in Mongolia. The name is the Mongolian form of the Sanskrit word svayambhu, meaning self-existing. According to tradition, Zanabazar saw the letterforms appear in the sky. He also developed a second script, known as Zanabazar Square.
How it works
Soyombo is an abugida, a script in which each sign is a syllable. Its syllabic system follows Devanagari and its base letter shapes derive from the Ranjana script. Every sign hangs below a horizontal line inside an angular frame made of an upper triangle and a vertical bar on the right. The first consonant sits high in the angle, vowel marks go above the frame, a second consonant is added inside the vertical bar, and a small hook at the bottom marks a long vowel.
How it spread
The script was used to write Mongolian, Tibetan and Sanskrit, mainly for Buddhist texts in Inner Asia. Most surviving examples are manuscripts and inscriptions, and it appears on temple inscriptions and prayer wheels. It was too complicated to become an everyday script.
What lasted
One special character of the script, the Soyombo symbol, became a national symbol of Mongolia. It has appeared on the national flag since 1911, and also on the state emblem, money and postage stamps. Soyombo remains a ceremonial and religious script. It was added to the Unicode Standard in June 2017 with version 10.0, following a 2015 encoding proposal.
