In the Middle Ages, the Roman alphabet and runes lived side by side. A new doctoral thesis challenges the notion that runes represent more of an oral and less of a learned form of written language.

What appears to be evidence of some of the oldest alphabetic writing in human history is etched onto finger-length, clay cylinders excavated from a tomb in Syria by a team of Johns Hopkins University ...

Archaeologists say they have uncovered evidence of what may be the world's oldest known alphabet. The alphabetic writing system was identified on finger-length clay cylinders excavated from a tomb in ...

IOUs, a note to a brewer, and the earliest handwritten document known from Britain — these are among the 405, nearly 2,000-year-old Roman waxed writing tablets archaeologists have unearthed and ...

In 2004, while she was still a meticulous young graduate student, Elaine Sullivan made a discovery that would deepen the history of human writing. Using trowels and brushes to remove ancient soil at ...

SANTA CRUZ — While a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University, UC Santa Cruz history professor Elaine Sullivan unearthed ancient artifacts in Syria marked with an alphabetic script whose meaning ...

Just outside the Syrian city of Aleppo, archaeologists have discovered what may be the oldest example of alphabetic writing ever found. Ahmad Sofi via Unsplash UPDATE: This story has been updated to ...

The Canannites invented the first alphabet about 3,800 years ago. The letters, instead of hieroglyphics like those used in Egypt, became the basis for written Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. English, ...

The oldest readable sentence written using the first alphabet has been found on the side of an ivory comb. The words are carefully inscribed in letters 1 to 3 millimetres wide and take the form of a ...