Meroitic Script: Did you mean...?

This limestone fragment (ostracon) is written with a Coptic script about the dispute of the church father Kyrill. From Thebes, Egypt. Byzantine Period, 4th to 7th century CE. (The Neues Museum, Berlin, Germany).

The hieratic script identifies the contents of the jar as wine of year 39. From Egypt; precise provenance is unknown. Late 18th Dynasty, circa 1375 BCE. National Museum of Ireland-Archaeology, Dublin, Republic of Ireland.

Manuscript with verses in diagonal lines of nasta 'liq script, written by Mir Emad Hassani, Iran, c. 1608-9. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

In primitive Irish, this reads " of Tob of the Sogain", a people known from later record. Ogam script was invented in the south of Ireland in the 4th century CE and used by Irish settlers in Britain. The notched letters on the edge of the...

The consonants of the ogham alphabet (non-IPA).

Though not necessarily an Israelite object, this object was uncovered around Samaria and dates to the Iron Age II (8th century BCE). It is 3.9 cm long (The Israel Museum, Jerusalem). The image is significant because it is evidence—among other...

The vowels of the ogham alphabet (non-IPA). Note: This is the vertical writing of ogham. In the horizontal form, the right side would face downward.

Chinese literature is among the most imaginative and interesting in the world. The precision of the language results in perfectly realized images whether in poetry or prose and, as with all great literature, the themes are timeless. The Chinese...

http://www.ted.com Rajesh Rao is fascinated by "the mother of all crossword puzzles": How to decipher the 4000 year old Indus script. At TED 2011 he tells how he is enlisting modern computational techniques to read the Indus language, the...

Elam, located in the region of the modern-day provinces of Ilam and Khuzestan in Iran, was one of the most impressive civilizations of the ancient world. It was never a cohesive ethnic kingdom or polity but rather a federation of different...