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.




Successful Layout & Design

German Typography History

By Carl Shank • August 31, 2026
German Typography History German typography has a particularly distinctive history because Germany was central to the invention of European movable-type printing, the development of Gothic/Blackletter typography, the rise of Fraktur, and later the modernist rejection of traditional German type. The story therefore moves dramatically from manuscript Gothic forms to highly ornate Fraktur, then to Bauhaus modernism and finally to contemporary digital typography. The history can be understood as a series of major transformations, as noted in ChatGPT, Gothic manuscript → Gutenberg → Schwabacher → Fraktur → Roman/Gothic duality → nineteenth-century industrial typography → Bauhaus modernism → New Typography → postwar modernism → digital pluralism. What makes German typography particularly fascinating is that the political and cultural meaning of type was unusually strong. Fraktur was not simply a letterform; over time it became associated with German language and identity, while the twentieth-century modernists deliberately sought to replace that historical visual language with an international, functional one. If you're studying European typography comparatively, German typography makes an especially useful contrast with Italian, French, Dutch, and English typography, because Germany's long attachment to Gothic type produced a very different trajectory from the Roman-type tradition that developed in Italy and subsequently dominated much of Western Europe. A number of Blogs I have written gives one an insight as to German historical typography and its central typographic characters, including typefaces and notes about Johannes Gutenberg, Marin Luther in Gothic type, Fraktur type and its extensive use in Germany, Rudolph Koch, the Bauhaus period with Herbert Bayer and Paul Renner, Futura, Jan Tschichold and Die Neue Typographie, and the influence of the Akzidenz-Grotesk font and its relationship to Helvetica, Univers, Neue Haas Grotesk, and Arial. Blogs that inform — Advance in Typography: Twentieth Century (Part 1) Type After Gutenberg: A Historical Sketch Theology of Type (2): Gutenberg to Early 1900s Early German Typography (Part 1) Early German Typography (Part 2 ) Blackletter Type & Universities About Sans-Serif Fonts Typography: A History of Machines Contemporary German Typography. Contemporary Germany has become one of Europe's major centers of type design. Important contemporary designers and foundries include Erik Spiekermann. Erik Spiekermann (born1947)( is a German art historian, typographer, designer, information architect and writer. He divides his time between Berlin, London and San Francisco. He runs Hacking Gutenberg, an experimental letterpress printing workshop in Berlin. He wrote Stop Stealing Sheep & Find Out How Type Works , a book on typography first published in 1993, revised 4th edition 2023. Spiekermann has designed numerous typefaces, both for sale and as part of corporate design programs. His typefaces include Berliner Grotesk (original is from 1913, digitization is from c. 1978), Fira Sans (designed in collaboration with Ralph du Carrois) for Firefox OS, released in 2013 under the SIL Open Font License), ITC Officina Sans and Serif fonts (1990), and FF Meta. FF Meta is especially interesting, as one of the fonts illustrated by axis-praxis for variable font use. It has 28 Instances offered through Adobe, from Condensed through Black, and a Variable font from Monotype. Spiekermann’s work emphasizes information clarity, signage, corporate identity, wayfinding, and digital typography. In German typography, wayfinding refers to the use of typography, symbols, color, spatial organization, and signs to help people navigate a physical environment. It is closely associated with Germany’s strong tradition of functionalist and systematic graphic design. Modern German typography is characterized by pluralism rather than a single national style. Contemporary designers freely use sans serifs, serif typefaces, variable fonts, neo-grotesques, geometric sans serifs, humanist sans serifs, contemporary revivals of Fraktur, experimental lettering, and digital display fonts. Fraktur remains visible in specialized contexts such as traditional breweries, historic businesses, newspapers and publications with historical associations, certificates, Blackletter music and cultural graphics, and Gothic/medieval-themed design, However, it is no longer the default German text type.

Italian Typography History (2)

By Carl Shank • August 29, 2026
Italian Typography and Futurism. One of Italy's most important contributions to twentieth-century graphic design came from Futurism. Beginning around 1909, Italian Futurists challenged conventional typography. The most important figure was Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. His Zang Tumb Tumb and related works used typography dynamically rather than simply as a vehicle for continuous reading. Zang Tumb Tumb is a sound and concrete poem appearing in journals between 1912 and 1914, when it was published as an artist’s book in Milan. It is an account of the Battle of Adrianople. The poem uses Parole in libertà (words in freedom; creative typography) and other poetic impressions of the events of the battle, including the sounds of gunfire and explosions. The work is now seen as a seminal work of modernist art, and an enormous influence on the emerging culture of European avant-garde print. (Wikipedia)
Show More