European writing – books, poetry, Bibles
Reproduction of a press from Gutenberg's time The invention of the European printing press with moveable type in northern Europe in the late 1400s AD was no accident: publishers had set out to find [...]
Reproduction of a press from Gutenberg's time The invention of the European printing press with moveable type in northern Europe in the late 1400s AD was no accident: publishers had set out to find [...]
The Lombards: a Lombard Christian altar (700s AD) (University of Alabama) Where did the Lombards come from? In 568 AD, a Turkic people, the Avars, pushed the Indo-European Lombards out of their home in Central [...]
Qing dynasty court lady reading a handwritten scroll (probably 1700s AD) Printing with movable type first began in China about 1000 AD. It caught on when European printers combined movable type with [...]
Cuneiform tablet from West Asia Most people in the ancient Mediterranean and West Asian areas spoke languages that divided into two groups. One language group is Indo-European and the other group is Semitic. In southern [...]
Early Japanese literature: A copy of the Kojiki from the 1300s AD Printing and paper in Japan Just after 700 AD, the Japanese Empress Genmei ordered her staff to write and publish Japan's [...]
Yamato Japan: Haniwa seated woman from a kofun tomb, possibly a Shinto religious leader (ca. 500 AD) From Yayoi to Yamato By the end of the Yayoi period (Japan's Iron Age) in 250 [...]
Boys in Mauretania learning Quran verses in a maktab from wooden tablets Schools in the Islamic Empire In the Islamic empire and in Africa, as in West Asia before Islam, most kids never went to [...]
Arabic language: Sabataean writing Where did Arabic come from? Arabic is in the Semitic language group. Semitic languages seem to have gotten started before the beginning of writing. That would be before [...]
How the alphabet evolved People in ancient Greece had a variety of different ways of writing down numbers, but none of them was very efficient. (And of course different Greek city-states used somewhat [...]
Ancient Greek music: an enslaved woman plays a lyre Some people have been trying to figure out what ancient Greek music might have sounded like. But most of what we [...]