Sarati was an early writing system developed by Rumil, a Noldorin elf of Valinor. It was actually a source of inspiration for Feanor when he was developing the Tengwar system (which ended up being used much more widely among the elves than Rumil’s Sarati, or even Daeron’s Cirth in Doriath).
Sarati looks, in some ways, similar to Tengwar, with one big exception: in most cases, Sarati was written from top to bottom (whereas Tengwar is always written from left to right.) But there’s actually a lot more variation among different examples of Sarati than there are with Tengwar. From an external point of view, this might be because Tolkien worked on it off and on for decades, so he kept changing his mind about things. From an internal point of view, though, this could be seen as a result of the fact that Sarati, as the earliest written form of language, simply hadn’t really been unified or standardized before it was largely replaced by Tengwar.
The actual structure of Sarati is far beyond me, but this website seems to do a really wonderful job of explaining what we know about this fascinating script.
As far as examples go: we don’t really see Sarati used within Tolkien’s writings about Middle Earth (excepting, of course, when he was actually writing about the development of Sarati.) However, there are some examples of Tolkien using Sarati – most notably, his 1919 diary. The sample below comes from the Amanye Tenceli website.
SOURCES: “The Sarati of Rumil“ at Amanye Tenceli, as well as a few brief mentions spread throughout the Histories of Middle Earth
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