Jurchen script

Jurchen script (Jurchen: dʒu ʃə bitxə) was the writing system used to write the Jurchen language, the language of the Jurchen people who created the Jin Empire in northeastern China in the 12th–13th centuries. It was derived from the Khitan script, which in turn was derived from Chinese (Han characters). The script has only been decoded to a small extent.

The Jurchens were the ancestors of the Manchu people and spoke a language related to the Manchu language. The Jurchen script, however, is not ancestral to the Manchu script.

According to the Sino-Jurchen glossary, the Jurchen script contains 720 characters. These comprise a mixture of logograms, which represent whole words without any phonetic element, and phonograms, which represent sounds. Compound words consisting of two or more characters were also used.

The Jurchen characters have a system of radicals similar to Chinese characters and are ordered according to radical and stroke count. The Jurchen script is part of the Chinese family of scripts.