Writing and Civilization: From Ancient Worlds to Modernity

Overview

Course No. 2241
Explore humanity’s revolutionary invention – writing – across 5,000 years of history. These 24 lectures trace:

• The origins of writing in Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, and the Americas
• Breakthrough decipherments of hieroglyphs, cuneiform, and Mayan glyphs
• How writing systems spread and evolved across cultures
• The future of writing in the digital age

Guided by an expert epigrapher, you’ll examine iconic artifacts like the Rosetta Stone while learning to read ancient scripts yourself.

Video Lessons

1. What Is Writing? (31 min)
   Examine writing’s essential role in civilization and the limitations of pictography.
2. Origins of Writing (31 min)
   Investigate monogenesis vs. polygenesis theories of writing’s invention.
3. Alphabet Origins (29 min)
   Trace our alphabet back to ancient Egyptian and Canaanite scripts.
4. The Fubark Alphabet (30 min)
   Discover the true history of Germanic runes beyond popular myths.
5. Chinese Characters (29 min)
   Explore 3,400 years of continuous Chinese script development.
6. Japanese Script (30 min)
   Understand why Japanese became the world’s most complex writing system.
7. What Is Decipherment? (29 min)
   Learn how archaeologists decode ancient scripts like cryptographic puzzles.
8. Five Pillars of Decipherment (30 min)
   Master the fundamentals needed to interpret lost writing systems.
9. Epigraphic Illustration (28 min)
   See how modern recording methods improve ancient text analysis.
10. Language History (30 min)
    Reconstruct ancestral languages through comparative linguistics.
11. Cultural Context (30 min)
    Use proper nouns and Herodotus’ accounts to understand ancient texts.
12. Bilingual Artifacts (29 min)
    Examine the Rosetta Stone and other key translation tools.
13. Egyptian Decipherment (30 min)
    Follow Champollion’s breakthrough in reading hieroglyphs.
14. Reading Hieroglyphs (30 min)
    Practice deciphering Egyptian’s mix of phonetic and semantic signs.
15. Old Persian Cuneiform (31 min)
    Learn how a high school teacher cracked this ancient script.
16. Cuneiform Contents (32 min)
    Discover Mesopotamian literature like The Epic of Gilgamesh.
17. Linear B (32 min)
    Explore Europe’s earliest writing system and its decipherment.
18. Mayan Glyphs (30 min)
    Uncover how Cold War politics affected Mayan script decoding.
19. Reading Mayan (30 min)
    Compare Mayan and Egyptian hieroglyphs through sample texts.
20. Aztec Writing (31 min)
    Examine Nahuatl script still connected to living languages.
21. Undeciphered Scripts (31 min)
    Analyze why Etruscan and Meroïtic resist interpretation.
22. Designed Scripts (31 min)
    Study constructed writing systems from Korean to Tolkien’s alphabets.
23. Medium & Message (31 min)
    See how papyrus, bamboo, and clay shaped writing’s development.
24. Writing’s Future (32 min)
    Speculate on handwriting, e-books, and speech-to-text innovations.