Ancient Languages

The Nag Hammadi Library: Secrets Preserved in Coptic

In 1945, a peasant in Upper Egypt unearthed a jar containing the "forbidden" Gnostic Gospels, forever altering religious history. This…

6 days ago

Beyond Greek: The 7 Demotic Letters of the Coptic Alphabet

While the Coptic script appears remarkably similar to Greek, it hides a linguistic secret: seven unique letters borrowed from the…

6 days ago

Roman Wax Tablets: The Ancient iPad

Long before the iPad, the Romans mastered mobile communication with the "tabula"—a reusable wax tablet that functioned as the ancient…

1 week ago

A Computer Learns ‘Amo, Amas, Amat’

Long before AI could write a poem, the pioneers of computational linguistics took on a monumental task: teaching a room-sized…

2 months ago

The Lost Vowels of Proto-Semitic

How do you reconstruct the vowels of an ancient language when its descendants, like Hebrew and Arabic, were written without…

3 months ago

Walls That Talk: Decoding Ancient Graffiti

Forget stuffy royal decrees. Ancient graffiti offers an unfiltered glimpse into the lives of everyday people, from lovelorn Romans to…

3 months ago

Sumerian: The First Written Language

Explore Sumerian, the world's first written language and a fascinating linguistic isolate. Discovered on cuneiform tablets, this ancient tongue challenges…

3 months ago

Why Tocharian Was an Anomaly

Imagine discovering a lost language in Western China that looks far more like Latin or Irish than its immediate neighbors,…

3 months ago

The Papyrus Revolution: How a Plant Built an Empire

Before the internet, before the printing press, there was papyrus. This humble reed from the Nile wasn't just ancient paper;…

3 months ago

The Tangut Script: A Lost Empire’s Code

Uncover the story of the Tangut script, a complex writing system that looks like Chinese but is entirely different. Created…

3 months ago

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