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The Past

This week: Ancient writing

Today, we live in a world of too much information: one in which a staggering 231,400,000 emails are sent out on average every single minute, according to the consumer data company Statista, along with countless million more text messages and…

The First Ghosts: Most Ancient of Legacies

Ancient Mesopotamian literature, written in cuneiform from around 3000 BC, is haunted by omens and ghosts. Most of the sources on ghosts come from the 1st millennium BC, written in Akkadian, but some texts and ideas hark back to even…

The Secret History of Writing

This intelligent, articulate, and visually imaginative three-part BBC documentary series about five millennia of writing – shortened into two parts for US transmission as A to Z in the PBS series NOVA – is particularly welcome, and will probably be watched for many years.

Above Writing equipment from a votive pit at a villa in Marktoberdorf, Bavaria. The cache includes an inkwell (back), a spatula (middle), and a small knife (front). The presence of this kit might suggest that writing played a role in the rites. ABOVE RIGHT A doctor’s grave from Vindonissa, Switzerland, where a cremation burial was accompanied with two scalpels (right), tweezers (centre), and an inkwell. Although in such cases the deceased are usually assumed to be men, detailed study of the skeletal material revealed the presence of a woman and child.

Age of ink: inkwells and writing in Roman Britain

The power of the Vindolanda and Bloomberg tablets to evoke our Roman past has made them justly famous, but just how widespread were writers in Roman Britain? Hella Eckardt reveals what inkwells can tell us about the arrival of literacy.