Tuyuhun Murong is a scan font covering the signs in an unknown script which are inscribed on the edge of stone epitaph for Mùróng Zhì 慕容智 (650–691) from his well-preserved tomb in the Tianzhu Tibetan Autonomous County 天祝藏族自治县 of Gansu province, which was discovered on 25 September 2019. Mùróng Zhì was the third son of Mùróng Nuòhébō 慕容諾曷鉢, last khan of the Tuyuhun 吐谷渾 kingdom, and so the inscription is presumed to be an example of the previously unattested Tuyuhun script.
Wooden coffin of Mùróng Zhì covered with silk cloth
Elephants marching left and right !
The stone cover of the epitaph is inscribed "大周故慕容府君墓誌" ("Tomb epitaph for the deceased Lord Murong of the Great Zhou") in seal script Chinese characters. Great Zhou refers to the short-lived Zhou dynasty (618–907) established by Empress Wu Zetian during the Tang dynasty (690–705).
Stone cover for the Epitaph for Mùróng Zhì
大周故慕容府君墓誌
Epitaph for Mùróng Zhì
The inscription in the supposed Tuyuhun script is inscribed in two columns along the left edge of the epitaph, and should be read vertically top-to-bottom from right to left. There seem to be a total of thirty-nine individual signs, 24 on the first columns and 15 on the 2nd column. Four signs occur twice in the inscription, so there are a total of 35 distinct signs. The last sign on the first column is very small, and may be a punctuation mark or an iteration mark, or it could be part of the sign above.
Rubbing of the unknown inscription on the epitaph for Mùróng Zhì
Source: 南夏之麟
The font includes glyphs for the 39 individual signs on the inscription, mapped to the Unicode Private Use Area at U+E000 through U+E026. The glyphs were generated using FontCreator by auto-tracing the characters on the rubbing shown above, but due to the low resolution of the image and other technical limitations the resultant glyphs are only rough copies of the original characters.
| Sign No. | Code Point | Glyph | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | U+E000 | | = Sign #35 |
| 2 | U+E001 | | = Sign #36 |
| 3 | U+E002 | | = Sign #20 |
| 4 | U+E003 | | = Sign #21 |
| 5 | U+E004 | | |
| 6 | U+E005 | | |
| 7 | U+E006 | | |
| 8 | U+E007 | | |
| 9 | U+E008 | | |
| 10 | U+E009 | | |
| 11 | U+E00A | | |
| 12 | U+E00B | | |
| 13 | U+E00C | | |
| 14 | U+E00D | | The circular mark in the lower left may not be an integral part of the character; or it may serve the same function as the 口 element on the left side of Signs #15 and #16. |
| 15 | U+E00E | | |
| 16 | U+E00F | | |
| 17 | U+E010 | | |
| 18 | U+E011 | | |
| 19 | U+E012 | | |
| 20 | U+E013 | | = Sign #3 |
| 21 | U+E014 | | = Sign #4 |
| 22 | U+E015 | | |
| 23 | U+E016 | | |
| 24 | U+E017 | | Possibly part of Sign #23, or may be a punctuation mark or iteration mark |
| 25 | U+E018 | | |
| 26 | U+E019 | | |
| 27 | U+E01A | | |
| 28 | U+E01B | | |
| 29 | U+E01C | | |
| 30 | U+E01D | | |
| 31 | U+E01E | | |
| 32 | U+E01F | | |
| 33 | U+E020 | | |
| 34 | U+E021 | | |
| 35 | U+E022 | | = Sign #1 |
| 36 | U+E023 | | = Sign #2 |
| 37 | U+E024 | | |
| 38 | U+E025 | | |
| 39 | U+E026 | |
Tuyuhun Murong is free to use for personal or commercial purposes For use on your computer or mobile device please download and install the TTF file. The WOFF and WOFF2 files are for web use only, and are not required by most users.
| Tuyuhun Murong | v. 1.000 (2021-05-30) |