I must apologize for the "ancientness" of the links on this page. I've pruned out dead links, but I haven't surfed very much for new ones. Hopefully I'll get some quality time to find good links to put on here.

Disclaimer: I, Lawrence Lo, the author of Ancient Scripts, do not hold any responsibility or creative control over the contents of the following sites. They solely express the opinions of their respective authors, not mine. They are provided as links because they may present information on writing systems. I do not verify the truthfulness of their contents. Any brief description or comment that I may attribute to these links are my own personal subjective opinions only, and therefore do not necessarily represent the actual content of the following sites nor reflect any reaction of the reader upon visiting them.

If you have any interesting sites or know of any please email their web addresses to me.

Writing Systems

• Global:
• Omniglot - a guide to writing systems
• Orthography: Writing Systems of the World
• Proel, better than this site, but in Spanish only!
• Yahoo's links on Writing Systems
• West Asia:
• Akkadian Language Page.
• Avesta -- Zoroastrian Archive.
• A Bequest Unearthed, Phoenicia, cool site about nearly all aspects Phoenician culture, including
• Cuneiform Collection, from Science Museum of Minnesota
• Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative
• Evolution of Alphabets, with animated GIF's.
• Georgian Language & Scripts
• Georgian Language, an outline grammar description.
• Hittite Home Page
• Mesopotamian Mathematics
• The Origins and Emergence of West Semitic Alphabetic Scripts
• Some Aspects of Older Writing Systems, about early Phoenician and Hebrew scripts
• the Phoenician Alphabet
• Sumerian Language Page.
• Africa:
• African Writing Systems, including scripts like the Ethiopic, Meroitic, Mende, Vai, and Nsibi. If the link doesn't work, please try this one.
• The Demotic Dictionary Project at the Oriental Institute of University of Chicago.
• Egyptian Hieroglyphs
• Francesco Raffaele Egyptology
• Mark Millmore's Ancient Egyptian Page.
• The Pronunciation of Ancient Egyptian.
• Were Egyptians the First Scribes?
• Europe:
• Alphabet Street, including "outdated" scripts of the former Soviet Union republics.
• Croatia - History and Cultural Overview contains pages on Croatian Glagolitic and Cyrillic scripts.
• The Enigma of the Venetic Script. The Venetic Inscriptions
• Every Ogham thing on the Web.
• Glagolitic Script (glagolica) and the Slavs
• Iberian Epigraphy Page
• Kodeks: Slavic language, scripts, and texts.
• Linear A and the Phaistos Disk, another page by Sergei Rjabchikov (see below in Pacific for his other pages) on his other works.
• The Slavonic Antiquity Home Page
• Tmutarakan', an Outlying Land Home Page
• Víteliú -- The Languages of Ancient Italy.
• South Asia:
• The Development of Scripts in India
• 'Earliest (Indus) writing' found
• Eden's Page: Scripts of all of Asia
• Harappa.com intereting site...lots of pictures with an accompanying essay.
• Languages and Scripts of India.
• Languages in pre-Islamic Pakistan -- Fascinating stuff!
• East Asia:
• Alibata - Ancient Baybayin Scripts Network
• Ancient Filipino Writing.
• Asian Language Terminology, actually about Asian writing systems
• Chinese Linguistics Page.
• A Study of Chinese Writing Systems
• Marjorie Chan's ChinaLinks.
• The World of Nushu
• The Writing Systems of Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese
• Zhongwen (Chinese Characters).
• Pacific:
• Rongo Rongo (Easter Island Script). This site presents two points of view (pro and con) on a recent breakthrough by Steven Fischer.
• The Rongorongo of Easter Island.
• Rongorongo homepage by Sergei Rjabchikov. The same author has another page on a number of articles on interpreting and reading some Rongorongo texts. There's yet another new page
• The Americas:
• Ancient Mesoamerican Civilizations has a section on writing systems.
• Epi-Olmec Decipherment, Archaeology article summarizing the discovery and analysis of the new text on La Mojarra Stela 1
• Epi-Olmec Font
• Epi-Olmec Writing and Texts, paper by Justeson and Kaufman on everything you need to know about La Mojarra (Epi-Olmec) writing.
• Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies
• GB Online's Mesoamerica.
• Glyph Dwellers
• Hieroglyphs and History at Copán
• Justeson et al., "A Newly Discovered Column in the Hieroglyphic Text on La Mojarra Stela 1: A Test of the Epi-Olmec Decipherment", Justeson and Kaufman paper in Science on the newly discovered column of text in La Mojarra Stela 1. This is a very technical piece of work.
• The Maya Epigraphic Database. Like what its name implies, it is a database of Maya glyphs, and not a page with pretty pictures or good introductory information.
• Mesoweb
• Precolumbian Art and Art History
• Rabbit on the Moon -- Nancy McNelly's very cool Maya site.
• Talking Knots of the Inka, a recently discovered manuscript may shed light on Inka "writing".
• Terrence Kaufman's running translation of the La Mojarra Stela 1

Fonts

• Coron's Sources of Fonts
• Curtis Clark's page of fonts.
• Yamada Language Center.
• RK Fonts, has Meroitic, Old Persian, Ugaritic, and Devanagari (which the author of this site calls "Sanskrit").
• Yi for LaTeX2e.
• Scriptorium, including a vast variety of Greek and Semitic fonts.

Historical Linguistics

• General Historical Linguistics:
• Etymological Database, including Sino-Tibetan, Yenisseian, Altaic, Chukchee-Kamchatkan, Dravidian, and Semitic.
• Nova: In Search of the First Language.
• Numbers in over 5000 languages
• Summer Institute of Linguistics, with its section Ethnologue, Languages of the World.
• The Three Dimensions of Human History: A Talk with Colin Renfrew.
• Regional:
• Himalayan Languages Project.
• Indo-European:
• The Indo-European Database
• Indo-European Home page.
• Indo-European and the Comparative Method.
• The Proto-Indo-European Sound System.
• What has a hippo in common with a feather, intriguing Proto-Indo-European etymologies of hippopotamus and feather.
• Numbers in Indo-European Languages.
• Numbers in Indo-European Languages. This is from "Numbers in over 5000 languages".
• "Knowing" Words in Indo-European Languages.
• UCLA Program in Indo-European Studies, not much here, but has a pretty good Links page.
• The Bagani Enigma, a centum Indo-European language in the Himalayas.
• Old English Pages.
• Avesta -- Zoroastrian Archives, including section on Avesta and Persian languages.
• Celts Historical Background and The Celtic Languages, both from Gaelic and Gaelic Culture.
• The Indo-European Roots of the words used for Focal an Lae, ie selected Irish words with their roots in PIE. This is from Focal an Lae - The Word of the Day in Irish.
• KHS Online - Linguistics.
• Chronology: History of English.
• Interview with Marija Gimbutas.
• Sino-Tibetan:
• Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus.
• Historical Linguistics of Chinese
• Old Chinese etymologies.
• Numbers in Sino-Tibetan Languages.
• Marjorie Chan's ChinaLinks
• Tibeto-Burman Languages.
• William Baxter's Home Page.
• Chinese Cultural Studies: The Chinese Language and Writing.
• Nostratic:
• Linguists Debating Deepest Roots of Language. There's another copy here.
• The Nostratic linguistic macrofamily
• Nostratic at Wikipedia
• Basque:
• Prehistory and Connections of Basque with Other Languages, from Larry Trask's Basque Page.
• Others:
• The Mayan Languages, etymological database for languages in the Mayan family.

Archaeology

• Ancient Web
• Anthropology in the News
• Archaeology Magazine
• Archaeologica
• Archaeology Channel
• Archaeology News
• Yahoo! News Full Coverage: Anthropology and Archaeology