Long before paper became affordable, the ancient world ran on ostraca—broken pottery shards used for everything from grocery lists and…
Long before the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, the Kingdom of Aksum produced the Ezana Stone, a trilingual monument inscribed…
While modern English relies on the Latin alphabet, our language was originally written in the angular, 33-character runic system known…
While Etruscan has long been considered a mysterious "language isolate", the discovery of the Lemnos Stele in the Aegean Sea…
While most assume the Latin alphabet evolved directly from Greek, the true story features a vital middleman: the Etruscans. This…
Discover the bizarre linguistic journey of the Liber Linteus, the longest surviving Etruscan text, which was cut into strips and…
Discover the "stoichedon" style of Ancient Greece, where inscriptions were carved in perfect, checkerboard-like grids without spaces or punctuation. This…
Contemporary with the famous Sumerian cuneiform, Proto-Elamite is a 5,000-year-old script from ancient Iran that remains almost entirely undeciphered. This…
Before the Greek alphabet conquered the Mediterranean, the island of Cyprus used a unique, puzzle-like script derived from the Bronze…
The Indus Valley Civilization left behind magnificent ruins and thousands of mysterious seals featuring a "unicorn" and short strings of…
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