The Mongolian Alphabet

Kublai Khan, ruler of half the known world, in 1260 A.D. established an official alphabet for his empire.

He intended for it to serve all the languages from Austria to Korea--to unify his vast Mongolian Empire.

Kublai's grandfather, Genghis, had used the Uighur alphabet, but that needed modification for writing the Mongolian language. The Mongolian alphabet is a central Asian derivative of the Aramaic alphabet with influences from Indic-Tibetan.

The Mongolian script is written vertically, from top to bottom like Chinese, but columns proceed from left to right, unlike Chinese. Today this alphabet is used in the Mongolian People's Republic and Inner Mongolia. However, the Russian Cyrillic script was decreed the official alphabet of the former in 1950 and is used to teach reading and writing in the latter.

The Mongolian alphabet was the work of three Tibetan lamas: Sa Skya, Phags-Pa, and Tsordji-Osir.