General BackgroundThe British Library has a terrific page on the history of English ("Living Words") for students and teachers. It includes activities around Beowulf, Chaucer and Dickens as well as good images and audio.The student activities are:
AncientScripts.com by
Lawrence K Lo is a great site for getting an overview of writing systems
and their history.
Alphapage.
An animated view of the evolution of alphabets. (This page is part of the
course material for "History of the Alphabets" taught by Prof. RobertFradkin
at University of Maryland.)
Odyssey
Online Museum outreach project at Emory University has a simple description,
illustrations and games for writing systems in the ancient world: Near
East;
Greece; Rome;
(The Rome entry includes a page on the Roman contribution of the codex
to book making
(vs. the scroll).
The British Library has a great teacher/student site on the working
with their collection called Living
Words. It includes a project called Why
Writing? with background, activities and images on the development
of writing and another project called Make
a Book! with instructions on how to make a Thai folding book.
Cornell University: Paper,
Leather, Clay and Stone - the Written Word Materialized
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ArabicSakkal
Design: Art of Arabic Calligraphy http://www.shariahprogram.ca/Arabic-alphabet14.shtml |
Cuneiform Cuneiform Digital
Library Initiative (a joint project of the University of California
at Los Angeles and the Max Planck Institute for the Hisotry of Science)
has extensive images and educational background on cuneiform. University of Pennsylvania's Write
like a Babylonian game translates your monogram into cuneiform.
British Museum's student's site on writing in MesopotamiaAs you might expect, the British Museum has a well-annotated classroom site on the history or cuneiform with lots of images from their collection. |
Chinese WritingBallad of Mulan Students can see a primary source for the familiar Disney Movie, Mulan. http://orias.berkeley.edu/mapping/scripts/Mulan.htmChina the Beautiful
is my favorite site on the Web for Chinese calligraphy. They also have
a great page on printing.
U. C. Berkeley collection
of rubbings offers visual examples of calligraphy
|
CyrillicAncientScripts.Com page on Cyrillichttp://www.ancientscripts.com/cyrillic.html |
Japanese WritingJapanese Writing Tutor This page is meant to help students of Japanese practice their writing skills. "By following along with the motion of several animated GIF files, you can hone your writing skills, making your katakana, hiragana, and kanji more legible." http://members.aol.com/writejapan/index.htm |
Egyptian Hieroglyphics:For a quick sheet of the common symbols: http://www.technologyindex.com/education/project/egypt/alphabet.html |
| Rome and Western Europe
Medieval
Writing: History, Heritage and Data Source by Dr Dianne Tillotson is
a friendly resource for Western European medieval handwriting as well as
background on the Roman era. I advise going to the site map and checking
out the various scripts and exercises. In the exercises Dr. Tillotson uses
interactive demonstrations to identify familiar letters in different historic
hands.
Another site on Medieval manuscripts with an easy-to-navigate for
an
Index of Facsimiles
Arranged by Script comes from Hesburgh Library at the University of
Notre Dame.
University of Melbourne publishes a CD for teaching
paleography (study of handwriting) called "Ductus" (way in which a
script is written). It has especially beautiful annotated images from the
history of Western European scripts. They have a demo on-line which includes
a number of the manuscript images, an excellent paleography vocabulary,
and videos of modern scribes demonstrating how ancient scribes might have
worked.
There are a lot of good sites for manuscript images available on-line.
One place to start is the British Museum.
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SanskritScripts Of All Asia page has comparative charts of alphabets across India.http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Academy/9594/ Sanskrit Letters and Numbers from UK India Sanskrit lesson site at http://www.ukindia.com/zip/zsan01.htm Languages
and Scripts of India is a useful reference site for links to historical
development and images.
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History of PaperA student-friendly history of paper written by Dr Peter F. Tschudin, Swiss Paper Museum and Museum for Writing and Printinghttp://www.paperonline.org/history/history_frame.html A one-page timeline
of papermaking and a slide show on how paper is made today from the
Mead paper company.
For an interesting story about how organic ink on paper in Senegal
is used by Muslims to literally drink in holy words see the Fowler Museum
page on their Passport to Paradise Exhibit.
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Suggestions? email: Michele
Delattre
The background image on this
page is from the Dead Sea Scrolls
site at Hebrew University of Jerusalem.