Chorasmien

The Central Asian country named Kwarezm was first mentioned in the 7th century BC. Its main part was located along Amu Daria river, where the territories of modern Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan were situated. The people that inhabited Kwarezm spoke their own language, which used the characters from this block.

The samples discovered can be divided in two separate styles of the Chorasmian script:

• Lapidary. The word itself implies that the inscriptions were made on solid material, which means that the system of writing is less complicated — with no connections. Whole epitaphs on stone coffins have been preserved. This style was the first to appear.
• Italic — inscriptions are present on wooden plaques, leather, coins. It is encoded in Unicode.

The earliest manuscripts containing Chorasmian writing date back to the 3rd century BC. It is believed to have evolved from . In the 8th century, with the spread of Islam, it was replaced by Arabic. The Chorasmian script had an impact on such writing systems as Parthian, Sogdian and Pahlavi.

The Chorasmian alphabet is characterized as constant. It includes 21 letters. The direction can be either from right to left or from top to bottom. Moreover, when it's from top to bottom, the lines go from left to right. The words are separated by an empty space. There are no punctuation marks.