WRITE IT
ANCIENT.

A simplified A-Z rune chart - every letter gets its own dedicated rune, no sharing.

The runes of the Elder Futhark are the oldest form of runic writing, used by Germanic peoples from roughly the 2nd to 8th centuries AD. Carved into stone, wood and metal, each of its 24 angular letters also carried a name and meaning, long before the Latin alphabet reached the north.

The Irish tree-alphabet - a simplified A-Z chart from the 20-letter original.

Ogham is an early-medieval alphabet used to write the earliest Irish, formed from sets of straight and slanting strokes crossing a central line. It survives mainly on standing stones from around the 4th to 6th centuries AD, where names were carved along the stone’s edge.

The 22-letter ancestor of the Latin alphabet - several modern letters share one sign, exactly as history does.

The Phoenician alphabet, in use by around 1050 BC, was one of the first widely adopted alphabets and the ancestor of the Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Arabic scripts. Its 22 consonant signs, carried around the Mediterranean by traders, are ultimately why the letters on this page exist.

A simplified A-Z chart built from genuine Sumerian syllable signs - not scholarly transliteration.

Cuneiform, developed by the Sumerians of Mesopotamia around 3200 BC, is among the earliest known writing systems. Scribes pressed a wedge-shaped reed stylus into wet clay - "cuneiform" means "wedge-shaped" - to record everything from epic poetry to rations of beer.

A simplified A-Z hieroglyph chart - the classic museum-worksheet alphabet.

Egyptian hieroglyphs blended pictures and sound-signs and were written for over three thousand years, from around 3200 BC to the 4th century AD. The script then went unread for centuries until the Rosetta Stone let Jean-François Champollion decipher it in 1822.