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The Ancient Mediterranean and Southwest Asia saw a great number of writing systems come into use and fall out of it. The most important for this site are:
- The Greek and Roman Alphabets, used for the ancient Greek and Latin languages, respectively (as well as some local languages, such as Gaulish, Phrygian and Punic).
- See also On Romanizing Ancient Greek, which elaborates how this site engages with ancient Greek.
- The Coptic and Old Nubian Alphabets, derived from the Greek, have primarily been used by Christians, but the former at least is also relevant for Egyptian polytheism in the Roman imperial period.
- Ancient Abjads refers to the many writing systems of antiquity that wrote consonants but few or no vowels, including the Ugaritic, Phoenician, Hebrew, Aramaic, and various Arabian scripts.
- The Egyptian Alphabet of Birds is a sort of abjad as well, although a conceptual one based on 25 sounds, each of which can be spelled in many different ways, rather than 25 letters. It is only a minor aspect of…
- … Ancient Egyptian Writing. [Work in Progress].
- Cuneiform Signs & Their Names: [Work in Progress].
- Linear B & Cypriot Script: [Work in Progress].
In addition to these writing systems, which were in common use, there are also scripts designed purely for ritual or magical purposes:
- Pseudo-Ibn Waḥšiyyah on Various Scripts: a 10th-century CE collection of many real and invented alphabets, including unique scripts for each planet and zodiac sign; also a symbolic interpretation of Egyptian hieroglyphs (disconnected from ancient usage).
Pages on further details about these scripts (e.g., the many early variants of the Greek alphabet) or on other writing systems (such as Persian cuneiform and other adaptations of cuneiform writing; the Meroitic alphabet; the alphabets of Asia Minor; Old Italic scripts like Etruscan; runes and the Gothic alphabet; Ogham; Mandaic; Geʽez; etc.) may be added in the future.
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