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On this day in antiquity: the final known text in Egyptian hieroglyphs is written down. These two texts from Roman Egypt, written in hieroglyphs and Demotic on the Nile island of Philae, are short, but they nonetheless give us their author's name and their date of creation: August 24th 394 AD.

If I am not mistaken, hieroglyphs are still the writing system with the longest continuous history in writing. Please don't retreat to Instagram exclusively. I guess there are still a few people around who refuse to debase themselves to using moving-images-based social media.

What’s the scope of "our“ here, with regards to taking *the* crown? Asking for Ukrainian and Greek friends.

Good to hear that! I think we have the moral obligation of fighting the rear-guard action of defending text-based social media. As for "our" alphabet, is it really 4000 years now? I'd rather go with the Greek-invented, phoneme-based writing system, which would now have around 2.800 years or so.

@lexiconleponticum.bsky.social @viewsproject.bsky.social

@dannybate.com @davidstifter.bsky.social Hmm, good question - I share David's caution in instinctively wanting to split up those alphabetic developments. The English/Latin alphabet is very different from Early Alphabetic/Proto-Sinaitic after all. Greek and Latin both have continuous...

I appreciate the abjad/alphabet corrective, but I still consider the setting up of the Proto-Sinaitic script (which is 'almost' phonemic, just missing Semitic's three vowels) 4K years ago as the bigger break in the history of writing. That is, compared with the modifications for the Greek alphabet

I am happy to be corrected on my own belief, but I guess this whole dispute could be framed along the lines of the chicken🐔/🥚 problem. 😅