General Background

• In Roots become the detective and trace some of the origins of the English language.
• In Changing Times investigate how English has changed across a thousand years.
• In the Word Building topic, find out how new words are made or where to go to borrow them. 
• And in Over to You! - look at English today and be creative with your own custom-built vocabulary. 

AncientScripts.com by Lawrence K Lo is a great site for getting an overview of writing systems and their history. 
http://www.ancientscripts.com/ 

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.) 
http://www.wam.umd.edu/~rfradkin/alphapage.html 

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). 
http://carlos.emory.edu/ODYSSEY/MidElem_Home.html 

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.
http://www.education.bl.uk/index.html

Cornell University:  Paper, Leather, Clay and Stone - the Written Word Materialized
Museum exhibit with educator resources.
http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/Paper-exhibit/default.html

Arabic

Sakkal Design: Art of Arabic Calligraphy 
A well-written site on Arabic Calligraphy by Mamoun Sakkal. 
http://www.sakkal.com/Arab_Calligraphy_Art4.html

http://www.shariahprogram.ca/Arabic-alphabet14.shtml
A detailed site with audio files and lessons on reading Arabic from The Toronto Shariah Program

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.
http://cdli.ucla.edu/

University of Pennsylvania's Write like a Babylonian game translates your monogram into cuneiform.
http://www.upennmuseum.com/cuneiform.cgi

Penn Museum of Archeology and Anthropology "About Cuneiform Writing" site for teachers and students.

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 Writing

China the Beautiful is my favorite site on the Web for Chinese calligraphy. They also have a great page on printing. 
http://chinapage.com/china.html 

U. C. Berkeley collection of rubbings offers visual examples of calligraphy 
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Rubbings/ 

Cyrillic

Japanese Writing

Egyptian Hieroglyphics:

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. 
http://medievalwriting.50megs.com/writing.htm

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.
http://www.nd.edu/~medvllib/facsimiles.html
 

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. 
http://www.medieval.unimelb.edu.au/ductus/

There are a lot of good sites for manuscript images available on-line. One place to start is the British Museum. 
Gutenberg Bible The British Museum has posted extensive images of this famous 15th century example of the introduction  printed Latin script. The BM has also posted good web sites for other "treasure" manuscripts in their possession such as Beowulf, the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Magna Carta. 
http://prodigi.bl.uk/gutenbg/ 
 

Sanskrit

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.
http://www.cs.colostate.edu/~malaiya/scripts.html

History of Paper

A one-page timeline of papermaking and a slide show on how paper is made today from the Mead paper company.
http://www.mead.com/ml/docs/facts/history.html 

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.
http://www.fmch.ucla.edu/passport/healmore.htm