Languages of antiquity · overview

Glossary of writing

Types of script, signs, direction of writing and the disciplines that study them

Abjad, abugida, determinative, boustrophedon, palimpsest: the pages on ancient scripts cannot do without technical terms. This glossary explains them with examples, mostly taken from the inscriptions and manuscripts described on the pages about individual civilizations.

How writing records language

All scripts rest on a handful of principles. A sign may stand for a whole word, it may record a sound (a syllable, a consonant or a single phoneme), or it may not be read at all and merely help the reader interpret the signs around it. Ancient scripts mostly combined these principles, and the type of a script depends on which of them prevails.

The classification used here follows the typology of the American linguist Peter T. Daniels, the one most widely adopted in linguistics. It is not the only one: other scholars, Florian Coulmas for instance, draw some categories differently, and the boundaries between types are fuzzy. The terms are grouped by theme, not alphabetically.

Types of writing systems

Scripts are classified by the unit of language that their basic sign records.

Logographic script (logography): A script whose signs (logograms) record words, or more precisely morphemes, the smallest units with a meaning of their own. No purely logographic script exists: without signs for sound, names and grammatical forms could not be written, so every script of this type has some phonetic component.Chinese is usually described as logographic: 人 rén “person”, 木 mù “tree”. Most Chinese characters, however, are phono-semantic compounds with a meaning part and a sound part.
Logosyllabic script (logosyllabary): A script combining logograms with signs for syllables (syllabograms), and often with determinatives. Cuneiform, Maya script and Anatolian (Luwian) hieroglyphs belong here. Egyptian hieroglyphs have signs for consonants instead of syllables and are therefore more precisely called logoconsonantal. Some linguists include Chinese here too, since each character corresponds to one syllable (a morphosyllabic script).The Maya word bʼalam “jaguar” is attested as the logogram BʼALAM, as the syllables bʼa-la-ma, and as a combination of both.
Syllabic script (syllabary): A script in which a sign records a syllable, usually a consonant plus vowel or a vowel alone; its set of signs is called a syllabary. Unlike in an abugida, signs for syllables with the same consonant do not resemble each other. Old Persian cuneiform stands on the border: most of its signs record a consonant with the vowel a, but can also stand for the bare consonant.Linear B: 𐀒𐀜𐀰 ko-no-so = Knossos. The cluster kn- received a helping vowel and final -s was not written; consonant clusters are awkward for syllabic scripts. The Cypriot syllabary and Japanese kana are syllabic as well.
Abjad (consonantal script): A script whose basic signs record only consonants; the reader supplies the vowels from knowledge of the language, or they are hinted at by helper letters (matres lectionis) or optional marks. It was introduced as a technical term in 1990 by Peter T. Daniels; the Arabic word abjad is the name of the old Semitic letter order, formed from its first four letters (alif, bāʾ, jīm, dāl). Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew and Arabic scripts are abjads.Phoenician 𐤌𐤋𐤊 𐤂𐤁𐤋 mlk gbl on the sarcophagus of Ahiram means “king of Byblos”; which vowels the words had, the script does not say.
Abugida (alphasyllabary): A script in which a basic sign records a consonant with an inherent vowel; other vowels are expressed by a systematic change of shape or an attached mark. Brahmi and the scripts derived from it (Devanagari, Tibetan, Tamil, Thai) belong here, as does the Ethiopic script. The term was introduced in 1990 by Peter T. Daniels after the Ethiopic name of this letter order, አቡጊዳ (ʾa-bu-gi-dā), formed from its first four signs.Brahmi: 𑀓 ka, 𑀓𑀺 ki, 𑀓𑀼 ku. Ethiopic: በ ba, ቡ bu, ቢ bi, ባ bā, ቤ be, ብ bə (or b with no vowel), ቦ bo.
Alphabet: A script in which consonants and vowels alike are written with separate letters of equal standing. The first such script arose by the 8th century BCE, when the Greeks adopted the Phoenician alphabet and used letters for consonants that Greek lacked to write vowels. From the Greek alphabet descend, among others, the Etruscan script and through it the Latin alphabet, as well as the Coptic and Gothic scripts and Cyrillic. In everyday usage the Phoenician script is called an alphabet too; in the narrower technical sense it is an abjad.Phoenician ʾalp 𐤀 became Greek alpha (Α), he became epsilon (Ε), ʿain omicron (Ο).
Featural script: A script whose letter shapes systematically express phonetic features of sounds, such as place or manner of articulation. The term was introduced by Geoffrey Sampson (1985), chiefly for the Korean script Hangul, its best-known example; some scholars (DeFrancis) reject the category.Hangul was promulgated in 1446 by King Sejong of Korea, so it is a medieval script, included here only for comparison. According to the explanation of the time, the shapes of the basic consonant letters imitate the position of the speech organs; an added stroke marks a sharper articulation, such as aspiration (the letter for k thus becomes the letter for kʰ), and letters are grouped into syllable blocks.

Signs

Terms for the different kinds of sign and for the ways signs work together in writing.

Logogram: A sign that records a whole word or morpheme. In transliterations of Akkadian and Hittite cuneiform texts, Anatolian hieroglyphs and Maya script, logograms are usually written in capitals.The Sumerogram 𒈗 LUGAL “king” in Akkadian and Hittite texts; Old Persian 𐏋 for xšāyaθiya “king”, whose use was optional. Today’s digits and the sign & are logograms too: everyone reads 1 in their own language.
Phonogram: A sign used for its sound value regardless of what it originally depicted. It may record a single sound, a consonant, a group of consonants or a syllable.The Egyptian owl 𓅓 reads m and the water ripple 𓈖 n, even when the word has nothing to do with owls or water. Egyptian phonograms record one, two or three consonants.
Syllabogram: A phonogram that records a syllable. Syllabograms are the basis of syllabic scripts and, alongside logograms, of logosyllabic ones.Cuneiform 𒈠 ma, Linear B 𐀏 ka. The Maya name Pakal is written pa-ka-la; the vowel of the last sign is not pronounced.
Determinative (classifier): A sign that is not read and only assigns a word to a semantic class: person, god, city, wood. It helps to distinguish words spelled with the same phonograms and often marks the beginning or end of a word.The Egyptian seated man 𓀀 after words for people and the town sign 𓊖 after place names; in cuneiform 𒀭 DINGIR before a god’s name and 𒌷 URU before a city’s: 𒌷𒄩𒀜𒌅𒊭 URU Ḫa-at-tu-ša, “(the city of) Hattusa”.
Phonetic complement: A phonogram added to a logogram as a reading aid. It adds no extra sound, only repeats part of the pronunciation and shows which of several possible readings of the logogram is meant.Egyptian 𓄤𓆑𓂋 nfr “good, beautiful”: the triconsonantal sign nfr followed by the signs f and r. Maya PAKAL-la: the logogram PAKAL “shield” and the syllable la, whose consonant repeats the end of the word.
Heterogram (Sumerogram, Akkadogram): A word written as it is spelled in another language but read in the language of the text. Heterograms arise when fixed spellings of words are borrowed along with a script.Hittite scribes wrote the Sumerogram 𒃻 NINDA “bread” and read it in Hittite; Sasanian scribes wrote the Aramaic word MLKA (in Pahlavi 𐭬𐭫𐭪𐭠) “king” and read it šāh.
Rebus principle: Using a sign for a word that sounds the same as, or similar to, the word the sign originally depicted. This is how pictorial signs turn into phonograms; the phonetic component of cuneiform, Egyptian and Chinese writing rests on this step.The Sumerian sign for arrow (ti) also served for til “life”. The name of King Narmer is written on his palette with the signs for catfish (nꜥr) and chisel (mr). The Chinese picture of wheat 來 came to be used for the similar-sounding word “come”.
Acrophony: The principle by which a sign or letter stands for the first sound of the word it depicts or after which it is named.In the Proto-Sinaitic script an ox head (ʾalp, “ox”) stood for ʾ, a house (bayt) for b and a water line (mayim) for m. Attic numerals are acrophonic too: Π (pente) = 5, Δ (deka) = 10.
Ligature: Two or more signs joined into a single graphic unit. In alphabets a ligature is usually a scribal abbreviation or a typographic device; in the scripts derived from Brahmi it is the regular way of writing consonant clusters.The sign & arose from a ligature of the Latin letters e and t (et, “and”). In Devanagari, k and ṣa join into the single sign क्ष kṣa.
Digraph: A pair (or trio) of letters that together write a single sound. Unlike in a ligature, the letters remain graphically separate.Czech ch; in the older digraphic Czech spelling also cz for č. Latin wrote ph, th, ch for Greek φ, θ, χ.
Virama: A mark in the abugidas derived from Brahmi that cancels a consonant’s inherent vowel, so that the sign records the bare consonant. It is used mainly at the end of a word; consonant clusters inside a word are normally written as ligatures. Sanskrit virāma means “stop”.Devanagari: क ka → क् k, वाक् vāk “speech”. In later Brahmi: 𑀓 ka → 𑀓𑁆 k (Ashoka’s inscriptions did not yet use the virama).
Mater lectionis (pl. matres lectionis): A consonant letter used in an abjad to indicate a vowel; Latin for “mother of reading”. In Hebrew and Aramaic the letters he, waw and yod, and sometimes aleph, play this role. Their use gradually increased during the 1st millennium BCE.The name David is spelled דוד in the books of Samuel and more fully דויד in Chronicles, with yod for the vowel i.
Diacritic: A mark attached to a basic sign that changes or specifies its value. In ancient scripts diacritics appear mainly as later additions, such as the vowel points of Hebrew and Syriac or the accents of Greek.In the 7th–10th centuries the Masoretes added dots and dashes for vowels to the consonants of the Hebrew biblical text: דָּוִד (David). Tradition attributes the Greek accents to the Alexandrian grammarian Aristophanes of Byzantium (c. 200 BCE). The Czech acute accent and háček (the latter developed from a dot only in the 16th century) build on the spelling described in the anonymous treatise De orthographia bohemica (c. 1406–1412), traditionally but uncertainly attributed to Jan Hus.
Numerals and positional notation: Numerals are signs for numbers. In positional notation a digit’s value depends on its place in the number, so the notation needs a sign for an empty place (zero). Positional notation arose independently at least twice, in the Babylonian sexagesimal and the (modified) Maya vigesimal system; Chinese counting rods were positional too. The decimal place-value system with zero that we use today appears in India around the 6th century CE. Egyptian, Greek, Roman and early Brahmi numerals were not positional: they had separate signs for tens, hundreds and higher orders.A Babylonian one could mean 1, 60 or 1/60, and a sign for an empty place appeared only in the 1st millennium BCE. The Maya 𝋡 above 𝋭 is 1 × 20 + 13 = 33, with a shell for zero. The oldest securely dated zero sign in India itself is in an inscription from Gwalior of 876.

A script is not a language

The same set of signs can serve many languages. Cuneiform, created for Sumerian, was used by Akkadians, Hittites, Elamites, Hurrians and Urartians; the Phoenician alphabet and scripts very close to it by Phoenician, Hebrew and Moabite and, in adapted form, by Greek. Today more languages are written in the Latin alphabet than in any other script, by some estimates thousands.

Conversely, one language often has several scripts. Egyptian was written in hieroglyphs, hieratic and demotic and finally, as Coptic, in an alphabet derived from Greek. Persian passed through Old Persian cuneiform, Pahlavi and Arabic script and is written in Cyrillic in Tajikistan. Luwian was written both in cuneiform and in Anatolian hieroglyphs. Today Serbian is written in Cyrillic and Latin alike, and Hindi and Urdu, very close in everyday speech, in Devanagari and Arabic script.

This is also why deciphering a script and understanding its language can part ways: we can read Etruscan inscriptions because their script comes from the Greek alphabet, but understand the language only in part. And the name of a script is not the name of a language: “hieroglyphs” is used for several different scripts – Egyptian, Anatolian, Cretan and Maya.

Direction and layout

Which way a text is read, how signs are arranged on the surface and how the text is divided.

Direction of writing: The order in which signs and lines follow each other. Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew and Arabic, and Kharosthi, derived from Aramaic, are written right to left; the Greek alphabet after the archaic period, the Latin alphabet, Brahmi and Old Persian cuneiform left to right. The Etruscans mostly wrote right to left.Egyptian hieroglyphs were written most often right to left, but also left to right and in columns; the direction is revealed by human and animal figures, which face the beginning of the line.
Boustrophedon: Alternating direction line by line: one line left to right, the next right to left. The Greek name means “as the ox turns in ploughing”. In the reversed lines the letters themselves are often mirrored.The law code of Gortyn in Crete (5th c. BCE), the Lapis Niger inscription in the Roman Forum, some South Arabian inscriptions. The lines of Luwian hieroglyphic inscriptions also alternate.
Writing in columns: Signs are placed one below another and the columns side by side. Chinese was traditionally written top to bottom in columns ordered right to left, probably under the influence of the narrow bamboo strips it was written on.Egyptian hieroglyphs often stand in columns. Maya signs are grouped into square blocks, and the blocks are read in pairs of columns, left to right and top to bottom.
Cartouche: An elongated oval closed by a bar at one end, with which the Egyptians enclosed two of the royal names, the ruler’s throne name and birth name. For decipherers of the hieroglyphs it showed where to look for names.Thomas Young showed that the cartouches on the Rosetta Stone contain the name of Ptolemy. Champollion compared them with the cartouches of Ptolemy and Cleopatra on the obelisk from Philae and obtained the values of a number of signs.
Scriptio continua: Writing without spaces or other dividers between words (Latin for “continuous script”). It was the norm in classical Greek and later also in Latin manuscripts, although the earliest Greek and Latin inscriptions did divide words. Spaces between words spread in Europe from Irish and Anglo-Saxon manuscripts of the 7th and 8th centuries.The Old Latin Duenos inscription is written right to left without spaces; Ashoka’s inscriptions do not consistently separate words either.
Word divider: A sign between words that does the job of today’s space: a vertical stroke, a dot, a colon or an oblique wedge.The Old Persian oblique wedge 𐏐; the Phoenician vertical stroke 𐤟 on the sarcophagus of Ahiram; a dot or colon in Etruscan inscriptions from the 6th c. BCE; a vertical stroke in the South Arabian script; a dot at mid-height of the line (·), the interpunct, in Latin inscriptions.
Punctuation: Marks that divide a text into sentences, verses and sections. Ancient scripts knew punctuation only in rudimentary form and did not use it consistently.Egyptian scribes wrote headings, the beginnings of sections and dates in red, much like medieval manuscripts, whose red headings are called rubrics (from Latin ruber, “red”). Tradition attributes a system of dots at different heights for Greek prose to Aristophanes of Byzantium.

Field and sources

Disciplines, working methods and the materials on which ancient texts have survived.

Epigraphy: The discipline that reads, dates, edits and interprets inscriptions on durable materials: stone, metal, pottery. Manuscripts on papyrus or parchment are studied by palaeography and papyrology.Ashoka’s edicts on rocks and pillars, the Behistun inscription of Darius I, the law code of Gortyn.
Palaeography: The study of old handwriting: the development of letter forms, abbreviations and scribal habits. It makes it possible to read a manuscript and to estimate from its script when and where it was written.The Etruscan linen book (Liber linteus) is dated by its script to around 250 BCE; radiocarbon dating points to older linen.
Transliteration vs transcription: Transliteration renders a text sign by sign, so that the original spelling can be reconstructed from it. Transcription records how a word was read or pronounced. Transliterations follow fixed conventions: capitals for logograms, hyphens between syllabic signs, and index numbers distinguishing different signs with the same reading.Old Persian 𐎧𐏁𐎠𐎹𐎰𐎡𐎹 is transliterated xa-ša-a-ya-θa-i-ya and transcribed xšāyaθiya “king”. Sumerian e₂ “house” and du₃ “build” carry an index because several signs have the same sound. Egyptologists read Egyptian nfr as nefer, but the inserted e is only a conventional pronunciation.
Bilingual and multilingual inscription (bilingual, trilingual): An inscription with the same or a similar text in two or more languages or scripts. It is most valuable to decipherers when one of the versions can be read.The Rosetta Stone (196 BCE) carries two languages, Egyptian and Greek, in three scripts: hieroglyphs, demotic and the Greek alphabet. The Behistun inscription of Darius I is trilingual: Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian. The Phoenician–Greek cippi from Malta, the Luwian–Phoenician inscription of Karatepe and the Etruscan–Phoenician tablets of Pyrgi are bilingual too.
Decipherment: Establishing how the signs of an unknown script are read, and understanding the language they record. The two need not come together: a script may be readable while its language is unknown, or the other way round.Linear B was deciphered in 1952 by Michael Ventris; it turned out to record Greek. Hittite tablets could be read because cuneiform was known, but the language was understood only by Bedřich Hrozný (1915). Linear A can be roughly sounded out, but its language is unknown. The Indus script remains undeciphered.
Clay tablet: A tablet of moist clay into which signs were pressed with a cut reed (cuneiform) or incised with a point (the Aegean linear scripts). Tablets were usually only dried and only sometimes fired, so many have survived thanks to fires.The Linear B tablets from Knossos and Pylos were baked by the fires that destroyed the palaces. The Persepolis Fortification Archive of Darius I contains tens of thousands of tablets and fragments.
Papyrus: A writing material made from the pith of the Nile papyrus sedge: strips were laid in two layers crosswise, pressed and dried, and the sheets were glued into rolls.The oldest known roll, uninscribed, comes from the tomb of the official Hemaka of the 1st Dynasty; the oldest inscribed papyri, from the harbour of Wadi al-Jarf, date from the reign of King Khufu. The word paper comes from Greek papyros, and Greek biblos, “papyrus, book”, is connected with the name of Byblos.
Parchment: Animal skin (calf, sheep, goat) cleaned of hair, stretched and dried, not tanned. It is tougher than papyrus and takes writing well on both sides. It is named after Pergamon in Asia Minor; the story that it was invented there when Egypt stopped exporting papyrus is regarded as a legend, since skins had been used for writing earlier.Most of the Dead Sea Scrolls are on parchment, as is the Codex Argenteus with the Gothic translation of the Bible.
Ostracon (pl. ostraca): A potsherd or limestone flake written on in ink or scratched. It cost nothing, and so served for notes, accounts, letters and school exercises.Egyptian scribes used ostraca routinely. In Athens names were written on sherds in votes on banishment; some 190 sherds bearing the name of Themistocles were written by only fourteen hands.
Scroll vs codex: A scroll is a strip of papyrus, parchment or another material rolled up and read by gradually unrolling it. A codex consists of folded sheets sewn together at the spine, like a modern book. The codex spread in the Roman Empire from the 1st century CE, especially among Christians, and during the 4th and 5th centuries displaced the scroll.The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Gandharan Buddhist birch-bark manuscripts are scrolls; the Vergilius Vaticanus (c. 400 CE) is a codex. The Maya codices are in fact folded like a screen, but the name codex has stuck.
Palimpsest: A manuscript whose original text was scraped or washed off so that the costly parchment could be written on again. The older text often shows through and can be read under ultraviolet light or by imaging at different wavelengths.The Archimedes Palimpsest: a 10th-century copy of works by Archimedes was overwritten in the 13th century as a prayer book. It alone preserves the treatise known as the Method; the Danish philologist Johan Ludvig Heiberg recognized Archimedes in it in 1906.
Abecedary: An inscription or practice text listing the letters of an alphabet in a fixed order. Abecedaries show how old the order of letters is.Practice tablets from Ugarit (14th–13th c. BCE) list the cuneiform letters 𐎀𐎁𐎂𐎃𐎄 (ʾa, b, g, ḫ, d) in almost the same order as the later Phoenician alphabet.

Sources and further reading

Peter T. Daniels, William Bright (eds.): The World’s Writing Systems. Oxford University Press 1996.
Florian Coulmas: Writing Systems. An Introduction to Their Linguistic Analysis. Cambridge University Press 2003.
Henry Rogers: Writing Systems. A Linguistic Approach. Blackwell 2005.
Ignace J. Gelb: A Study of Writing. University of Chicago Press 1952, 2nd ed. 1963.
Peter T. Daniels: Fundamentals of Grammatology. Journal of the American Oriental Society 110, 1990.
Geoffrey Sampson: Writing Systems. Hutchinson / Stanford University Press 1985.