The Script No One Can Read Anymore

Lyrics

[Intro]
(a stone rubbing, a page of unfamiliar characters turning)
Tangutology. The Western Xia. An empire you have never heard of.

[Verse 1]
They had a capital, an army, a bureaucracy, a Buddhist canon,
they held the Silk Road for two hundred years, they printed books,
and in twelve twenty-seven the Mongols came and unmade them
so completely that the dynasty was left out of the histories,
and the language went silent, and the script — their own invention,
six thousand characters, deliberately unlike Chinese — went dark.

[Chorus]
The script no one can read anymore. Designed to be difficult.
Designed to be beautiful, and theirs, and nobody else's —
and it worked. It was theirs. And then there was nobody left
who had been taught it, and a whole grammar closed like a door.
The script no one can read anymore. Except now, slowly, we can.
Somebody studies this. Somebody spent a life getting in.

[Verse 2]
It came back through a bilingual — a text in Tangut and Chinese,
found in a dead city in the Gobi in nineteen hundred and nine,
and from that one hinge a century of scholars pushed it open
character by character, the way you'd pick a lock with a wire,
and there are people now, a few dozen on the whole earth,
who can sit down and read a language that died eight hundred years ago.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
And what do the texts say? Mostly ordinary things. Law codes.
A dictionary. Poems. A primer for teaching children to read it.
Somebody wrote a schoolbook for a script that would have no pupils,
and it survived, and it is now the thing that teaches us.
The teaching manual outlived the entire civilisation.
That is either very sad or very funny. It might be both.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(the page turns)
Somebody made this up.
Somebody sat down and invented six thousand characters.