Thief Guild
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Where are those symbols coming from?   





There are more glyphs than those used in my TDS anniversary fun site.

Dongba symbols, which are pictographic glyphs used by Naxi people in southern China, are closely similar to those we know from original Thief series.

As per Wikipedia:

In the Naxi language it is called 'wood records' or 'stone records'. The first artifacts with this script on them originate from approximately 30 AD.


In my IT career, I had an episode of working in China for couple of months. During this time, I had also vacation where I discovered those symbols in one of the folklore parks in Shenzhen, namely China Folk Culture Village.

In the park, there were installations of folk culture buildings and arts faithfully reproducing the cultural heritage of various ethnic minorities in China. One of the installations I visited was dedicated to Naxi people, creators of the Dongba system.


My wife taking pictures of Dongba paintings.

I immediately knew what it reminded me of.

Dongba glyphs were used by Bon priests of Naxi. Scripts written by them served as a prompt for the recitation of ritual texts. [source]. Dongba script emerged to serve its religious purpose, and it remains this way until today. Nowadays, all Naxi chinese people write in Chinese language and, presumably, Dongba is still used during demon exorcisms sessions [source]


Sample table with Dongba pictograms description in Shenzhen China Folk Culture Village Park.

Wikipedia claims that there are about a thousand glyphs, but this number is fluid as new glyphs are coined.

Priests drew detailed pictures to record information, and illustrations were simplified and conventionalized to represent not only material objects but also abstract ideas. Glyphs are often compounded to convey the idea of a particular word. Generally, as a mnemonic, only keywords are written; a single pictograph can be recited as different phrases or an entire sentence.


Personally, I wanted to use Dongba symbols already somewhere in the Thief universe, and I never had time to do so.

I thought Thief: Deadly Shadows 20th Anniversary might be a good ocassion to introduce Thief community to this interesting topic, hoping to ispire fan mission authors. I think the topic of glyphs is underexplored in the Thief universe, and I'm sure I'm not alone.

Konrad

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Further reading:

(PDF) Revised Proposal for Encoding Naxi Dongba Pictograph in the SMP of the UCS, 2010

(Wayback Machine Page) Dr. Richard S. Cook, Naxi Pictographic and Syllabographic Scripts: Research notes toward a Unicode encoding, 2007 Berkeley, California, USA

Naxi Script Resource Centre

Downloads:

Naxi Dongba in Excel File

Naxi Dongba Font (Used on ThiefGuild.com)








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