Ancient Alphabets

Carl Shank • October 28, 2023

Ancient Alphabets. How did our alphabet come to exist? Much of what we know about the alphabet comes from Middle Eastern and Egyptian sources. In my previous BLOG ("What's In A Name?") I investigated the creation of the alphabet and how our modern letters were formed. Again, I refer the interested reader and researcher to the excellent work by David Sacks, Letter Perfect: The Marvelous History of Our Alphabet from A to Z, available at Amazon.com. This particular blog offers readers and historical users the opportunity to see and download several ancient alphabetic fonts that history has uncovered.


It should be noted that in the computer world, Google fonts has produced several ancient fonts, only in Unicode offerings. They are Noto Sans Cuneiform, Noto Sans Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Noto Sans  Ugaritic, Noto Sans Old Persian and Noto Sans Imperial Aramaic. These are extensive fonts with hundreds or even thousands of characters in Unicode format. What that means is that finding a particular pictogram or etching (what ancient fonts look like) for a particular letter is next to impossible, unless one knows the exact letter font coding. They are also open source fonts, available for use and reconstitution.


Using a reliable historical source, we can match letters or numbers to font glyphs. Consequently, what CARE Typography has been able to do is to recreate some of these ancient fonts that match the alphabet's capital lettering. Thus, in the Noto Sans font for Egyptian Hieroglyphs when you type the letter "A" you get back "A," not the Egyptian Hieroglyph for "A." The same holds true for the other Noto Sans fonts. We were able to reformulate some of the ancient fonts so that "A," for instance, gives you the correct ancient letter or pictogram. Note the diagrams below.


EgyptHiero. This is the reconstituted Noto Sans Egyptian Hieroglyph only for the capital letters of our alphabet. A bit of history here. Egyptian hieroglyphics were used for writing the Egyptian language from about 3000 BC until 400 AD. Symbols resembling hieroglyphs had been used by artisans in the region since 4000 BC, but with no ascertainable linguistic content. The first hieroglyphs were used for making inscriptions on buildings and tombs. Later they came to be used to decorate jewelry, record events on papyrus and to put a royal or divine signature, called a cartouche on an item. The Egyptian hieroglyphic system of writing consisted of both phonetic symbols and pictographs. There were about 30 symbols representing single consonants.


UgariticCuneform. This is the reconstituted Noto Sans Ugaritic font only for the capital letters of our alphabet. Ugaritic is a historical Middle Eastern abjad, written left-to-right. Was used in today’s Syria in 1500-1300 BC for the Ugaritic language, and also for Hurrian. Has 30 letters that visually resemble cuneiform. The Ugaritic script was used from about 1500-1300 BC to write the Ugaritic language, spoken in modern-day Syria. It was also occasionally used for writing documents in the Hurrian language. Visually, the script resembled Cuneiform, with each letter written as one of a combination of short, linear wedges.


OldPersianA. This is the reconstituted Noto Sans Old Persian font, again only for the capital letters of our alphabet. Old Persian cuneiform was the main script for writing the Old Persian language from 525-330 BC. Visually it resembles Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform; most of the letters are arrangements of between two and five horizontal, vertical or angle-shaped wedges. However, there appears to be no derivational relationship between the sound-to-symbol mapping of individual letters in the two scripts, nor has any other script been found which links the forms of the scripts. For this reason, Old Persian cuneiform is generally believed to have been an independent invention.




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Free Fonts: A Deal or Trouble?

By Carl Shank • February 12, 2026
Free Fonts: A Deal or Trouble? The latest Google estimate of available fonts is over 300,000 and counting. Other estimates have catalogued over 550,000 fonts. There are over 36,000 font families, over 4,000 type designers and over 2,700 professional font foundries, not counting smaller font entrepreneurs like CARE Typography, which provides restored fonts from yesteryear. (Quora source https://www.quora.com/How-many-fonts-are-there-in-existence-Does-any-group-attempt-to-keep-a-record-of-all-the-fonts-that-exist ) There are commercial fonts from sources like Adobe and MyFonts (Monotype) which require payment for their use in various platforms. Both provide a subscription service, which usually requires a substantial monthly or yearly fee to download and use their fonts. When I began using Apple Macintoshes in the 1980s, font manufacturers like Adobe and Monotype would “sell” the right to use a number of their fonts for thousands of dollars. And, by the way, you never really “own” the font. You have paid only for the use of the font for a specific purpose or machine. Moreover, the price varies for print use, or web use, or a digital ad use. Even today, the font Trinité Titling by Bram de Does, used in a number of Bibles and biblical studies, costs over $4,000 for the use on a single computer and much more for a number of computer users. Individual users of such fonts are mostly priced out of their budget. Why the seemingly extravagant cost? We had a valve on one of our household plumbing lines go bad. I called the plumber, and he replaced the valve — at a cost of several hundred dollars, while the valve itself cost only a few dollars. Was that fair? Yes, because I was paying for the time and training and effort going into replacing that valve in my house. The same holds true for professional font designers. They spend hundreds, sometimes thousands, of hours in font development. We are paying for their livelihood. Font licenses cover four basic parameters around font usage — “The What: The weight and style of the typeface; The Where: Literally where you’ll use the font – a website, digital ad, or in print; The Who: The number times a font can be installed on a computer (aka the number of people who can use it); The How many: For example, web font licenses describe the number of allotted page views, and app and digital marketing licenses set similar parameters.” (Monotype Report) Companies like Monotype are rarely concerning with an individual using a font for a home, individualized project, but rather an entire design company or printer using that font for commercial gain and advertising dollars. There are fonts available “for personal use only,” prohibiting their use for commercial or money-making projects. There are what have been called “shareware” fonts, fonts with a minimal cost which require attribution of the type designer or provider on projects. Most fonts provide a EULA, or font license, which outlines and determines the legal restrictions and ramifications for their use. What about free fonts? Monotype warns against using unlicensed or what are called “free” fonts for several valid reasons, but, in my opinion, this is an obvious ploy to get the user to buy or subscribe to their font services. One Monotype report cites six issues associated with what are deemed “free” fonts. Free fonts may pop up in similar ads or designs to industry competition, perhaps prompting a lawsuit or cease-and-desist actions. Free fonts often have the inability to scale, add special characters, or even different alphabets. Free fonts have limited creative scope. They may be saddled with malware or software viruses. Poor font design can be a problem with such fonts. A sixth problem with so-called free fonts is that they can be actually “pirated” fonts, copied from legitimately designed fonts. “Aside from branding issues, free fonts also suffer from a whole host of performance issues. Fonts are software files that interact with applications and the operating system on which it’s installed; without the guidance of a skilled font engineer, rendering issues may arise from crashing glyphs, or a lack of proper kerning (the space between glyphs) text in certain scenarios. A free font downloaded from a random website might not support a broad range of languages and or complex scripts (e.g., Japanese or Arabic), or basic diatrics to cover commonly used Latin languages.” (Monotype Report) Monotype maintains that free fonts won’t give a company the individual style it deserves to help it stand out in the marketplace. They also point to the legal ramifications involved with font licensing, not a glamorous subject but one in which company attorneys are hired to examine for possible litigation. Types of Free Fonts There are four sources of free fonts — Open Source fonts with an SIL Open Font License (SEE https://openfontlicense.org ); OS fonts, fonts that come with your operating system and hardware; Subscription add-on fonts that come as an add-on to a subscription service; and, advertised free fonts by independent font designers, such as CARE Typography. Many or most of such free fonts come from freeware, shareware, public domain or demo fonts downloaded or reconstructed from an archive or library, like Internet Archive. Companies such as Website Planet offer free “commercial” fonts, fonts that can be used in business and corporate applications. See https://www.websiteplanet.com/blog/best-free-fonts/. Several cautions, however, are still in order here. First, a font that “looks like” a standard, business font is not the same thing as its “older brother.” An example is Website Planet’s Playfair Display font, both a variable and static font designed by Claus Eggers Sørensen licensed under the SIL Open Font License agreement. Yet, this font looks a lot like the standard Bodoni font, created by Giambattista Bodoni in 1767 and revived by Morris Fuller Benton in 1911 under Linotype’s commercial license.

More On The Greek Font

By Carl Shank • December 23, 2025
More on the Greek font. In a previous post ( It's Greek To Me! March 18, 2023) we noted that Cursive Greek type appeared as a chancery script by Francesco Griffo in 1502 and lasted two hundred years. Robert Bringhurst notes that "chancery Greeks were cut by many artists from Garamond to Cason, but Neoclassical and Romantic designers . . . all returned to simpler cursive forms . . . in the English speaking world the cursive Greek most often seen is the one designed in 1806 by Richard Porson." This face has been the "standard Greek face for the Oxford Classical Texts for over a century." ( Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style, Hartley & Marks, Version 3.1, 2005 , pp. 274, 278) In fact, asking Google for the best Greek face to use, it points us to Porson Greek. Porson is a beautiful Unicode Font for Greek. It's not stiff, like many of the cleaner fonts, which are usually san serif. It is bold and easy to read and seems to more closely match the orthography in newer textbooks. (Jan 8, 2004) 
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