The pictographic Dongba script
Dongba is a rare pictographic script used by the Bon priests of the Naxi people in southern China. It is pictographic because its symbols are meant to look like the events and actions it describes.
Dongba is in many ways similar to trying to write a history using emojis. Obviously this is an oversimplification and doesn’t do the complexity of the script justice, but it’s a useful analogy because like emojis, you can’t interpret a string of Dongba characters without already having some idea of what the text is trying to say.
Thus, Dongba serves more like a pictographic mnemonic for the Bon priests than an actual writing system. In fact, Dongba is often supplemented with characters from the geba syllabary for clarification.
Here are two images from a Naxi manuscript, displaying both pictographic Dongba and the smaller syllabic geba (courtesy of Wikicommons).
Now, UNESCO is launching an online course to teach Dongba, as part of its efforts to support indigenous languages this decade:
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