Runes & Ancient Writing

Unit I: The First Foundations

Greetings, scholars.
Before we chase the alphabet across the ancient world, we must visit the world before the alphabet existed.
It is a common mistake to imagine writing springing into being all at once, as a gift for poets. The truth is stranger and, to my mind, far more interesting. Writing was invented by people counting things: sheep, grain, jars of oil. The first writers were not bards but bookkeepers, and their invention, pressed into river clay five thousand years ago, became the foundation under every letter you have ever read.
This unit gives you three such foundations. In Mesopotamia, you will press the wedge yourself and learn why a change in technique, from drawing signs to pressing them, reshaped the world's first script. In Egypt, you will watch pictures learn to spell sounds, and you will read real hieroglyphs before the unit ends. In Persia, you will meet a writing system designed from scratch by royal decree, elegant and deliberate, carved where no merchant would ever need it. Three civilizations, three answers to the same question: how do we make marks that speak?
Everything after this unit is built on what you learn here. The alphabet does not fall from the sky in Unit II. It is stolen, piece by piece, from the systems you are about to meet.
-Professor Thistleloom Webblethorn

Unit Learning Objectives

By the end of this unit, scholars will be able to:

Explain why writing was invented for accounting centuries before it was used for literature or story.
Identify the five basic wedge forms of cuneiform and explain why the shift from drawing to pressing changed the script's appearance.
Read introductory Sumerian signs and explain the difference between logograms and phonetic signs.
Describe the three jobs a hieroglyph can perform (logogram, phonogram, determinative) and apply the Rebus Principle.
Determine reading direction in a hieroglyphic inscription and explain the purpose of the cartouche.
Describe Old Persian cuneiform as an engineered system and read its basic signs, including the word divider.

What Scholars Will Practice

Your hand learns before your eye does. You will press the five wedge forms into clay with a flat-cut stylus until your impressions are clean, copy the eight uniliteral hieroglyphs until each is recognizable, and draw the Old Persian signs with their tiny but mighty word divider. By the unit's end you will read real Sumerian signs (AN, KI, É), spell with Egyptian sound-signs, and work through a short Old Persian inscription. Keep your clay tablets. Scholars in later units have been known to look back at them with new respect.

In This Unit

Lesson 1: Cuneiform — The Structural Wedge.

How Sumerian accountants invented writing by pressing shaped tokens and then wedges into clay, and the five wedge forms that started everything.

Lesson 2: Hieroglyphs — The Uniliteral Sound-Signs.

How Egyptian pictures learned to spell sounds through the Rebus Principle, plus cartouches, reading direction, and eight real signs you will read yourself.

Lesson 3: Old Persian — The Engineered Illusion.

A royal writing system designed from scratch for the Behistun cliff: simple, elegant, and deliberately unlike the Mesopotamian cuneiform it resembles.

Onward
Three foundations laid: the wedge, the picture-sign, the engineered royal script. In Unit II, Semitic-speaking workers in the mines of Sinai look at Egyptian hieroglyphs and steal the most powerful idea in writing history. One sign, one sound. The alphabet is coming, but someone has to invent it first.
— Professor Thistleloom Webblethorn