Zanabazar Square

The Zanabazar Square script (also called Zanabazarin Dörbelj or Horizontal Square Script) was another writing system created by Zanabazar in the seventeenth century, alongside Soyombo. It was used primarily for writing Sanskrit and Tibetan religious texts in a monastic context in Mongolia. The script is written left to right and is an abugida in which vowels are indicated by diacritical marks on consonants. Its square, blocky letterforms are reminiscent of Tibetan squared scripts and Phagspa. Like Soyombo, its use was largely confined to learned and liturgical circles. The script was added to Unicode in version 10.0 (2017) and is now studied mainly by scholars of Mongolian Buddhist manuscript culture.