The VIEWS project

We are delighted to announce an exciting programme of seminars for the coming term, taking place in May and June 2026. The first two seminars are in-person/hybrid, the second two online only – all can be watched online via the same registration link. All are welcome, in person and online!

Zoom registration

20th May: Piers Kelly (in-person/hybrid: room 1.04, Faculty of Classics)

The origins and evolution of writing: a very brief synthesis

3rd June: Jeiran Jahani (in-person/hybrid: room 1.04, Faculty of Classics)

Pluriverse of animals in lexical lists of the Late Uruk period

10th June: Sveva Elti di Rodeano (online only)

Phrygian and the Spread of the Alphabet

17th June: Vincent Morel (online only)

Inscribing Territoriality: Graffiti and the Politics of Visibility in Egypt’s Eastern Desert

VIEWS ET 2026 seminarsDownload

Further note: If you happen to be interested in the broad VIEWS research remit (or generally any kind of writing geek, whatever your specialism!) and are based in or visiting Cambridge, you are very welcome to come and hang out with us for other events. Please email views@classics.cam.ac.uk to introduce yourself and we can put you on our local mailing list.

In March we were very lucky to have the opportunity to host a Jamigraphy session as part of the Cambridge Festival, thanks to funding from the CRASSH events programme. Jamigraphy is a process inspired by the improvisational logic of jazz and hip hop culture, inviting participants to write in response to live soundscapes and musical improvisation. It emerged as a practical experience of a wider research on the possibilities of writing as explored by Alice Mazzilli, a writer, calligrapher and artist who is a long-term friend of the VIEWS project.

The word Jamigraphy fuses jamming and calligraphy, and evokes a conceptual fusion of rhythm and writing. In the session, several people referred to it as an exercise in “free writing”. We provided paper on the wall and tables, and a range of pens, markers, crayons and brushes, as well as live music. Participants could stand or sit and write whatever came to them, wherever and however they felt like it within the constraints of available materials and surfaces. I was really delighted and astonished by the results – both the beauty of the combined production of writing, and the atmosphere of collective enjoyment. More on these shortly!

There was also a really wonderful fusion of research interests, which we tried to tease out in a presentation and panel discussion at the start of the day. I opened by saying a few words about factors that are very difficult to recover in relation to historical writing, where you can’t simply talk to the people who produced inscriptions and manuscripts. Writing is something you do, a physical practice and experience, and it goes far beyond the linguistic encoding of sounds and/or meanings. I’m especially thinking of the embodied postures and gestures involved, as well as materials and implements, but also the environment, the soundscape and smellscape, the effect of moods and emotions. The visual aspects of writing that we are interested in at the VIEWS project are really reliant on factors like these.

One of the images I showed was this lovely Egyptian statuette (below), depicting a writer who has broken free of the conventional cross-legged, straight-backed pose associated with Egyptian scribal activity (with papyrus held taught across the knees) and instead adopts a position that, to me, seems to exude comfort and calmness. A rare and valuable glimpse of dynamic individual practice, a writer assuming a posture that presumably suits their mood or feelings.

Alice then explained the research project, Interowriting, which focuses on a phenomenological understanding of handwriting that rejects the Cartesian dichotomy between mind and body, writing and art. Harnessing a framework of interoception, Interowriting looks at writing from within: we are never outside the processes we participate in, so we are affected by them as much as we affect them. Practising writing itself affects and organises our perception, just as the way we write responds to factors like posture, rhythm, emotional state and embodiment. She compared the Greek concept of techne, encapsulating a form of knowledge based in practice, with the Zulu concept of ubuCiko, which refers to a mode of making in which knowing, doing and sense all unfold at the same time.

Pule kaJanolintji then took this further. We tend to be so used to an Aristotelian model of understanding reality (where, for instance, the name for a given thing is a conventional way of referring to its likeness or pronunciation but is not itself the true thing), that it is easy to overlook other ways of thinking about perception and ontology. He related the philosophy of ||Kabbo, a 19th century |Xam sage of South Africa whose words were recorded by the linguist Lucy Lloyd: when the name or sign for a thing matches its image or concept, a person feels it inside their body as a true sign (|ʼam̩). This could be thought of in terms of affect, the inner experience of the feeling in harmony with the outer experience.

Helen Magowan introduced another strand to the discussion, transporting us to early modern Japan to experience Japanese writing in an age before (moveable) typography affected many of its essential features. She showed an image of young girls being taught to write with a brush pen, not by being taught every individual sign in the abstract but by being taught how to hold and move the brush, and by observing the motions and postures of the act of writing. Each character is composed not of disembodied lines and curves but of strokes, the control and release of pressure, breaths and pauses. Reading a manuscript is like the viewing of a performance, a series of movements and feelings transferred quite tangibly to the page.

This brought us full circle, to think about the many ways we understand writing as action and as practice, entangled with our bodies and emotions and experiences. The Bété concept of Na Glè was also mentioned – thanks to advice from another current Visiting Fellow, Adam Yeo – in a very similar vein, as a way of knowing through action that encompasses both gesture and an understanding of the structure and context of the system. Members of the audience also contributed different perspectives, such as interactions with neurodiversity. All these observations led us into the practical element of the workshop where Alice directed us to put theory into practice, exploring writing as an interoceptive act by entering into a gestural improvisation that emerges from the dialogue between sound and sensation: a rhythmic dialogue, where we each drew on our senses and surroundings as we spontaneously contributed to the collective effort of writing.

I had not been involved in a Jamigraphy session before, and despite months of planning with Alice I didn’t really know what it would be like until it happened. What I experienced was quite unexpectedly moving: the coming together of people in shared activity, each bringing themself and their thoughts and experiences, yet contributing to a larger whole that emerged through connections and mutual respect. The collective writing on the wall in each session produced a beautiful composition, where each writer contributed uniquely while working around and sometimes interacting with what others had produced. The contributions were highly diverse in language and script, style and colour, and without exception everyone was accepting and appreciative of each other’s efforts.

The music was provided by Òtító J.E., Pule kaJanolintji and our Endangered Alphabets colleague Tim Brookes, quite literally setting the tone for the whole event. Instruments included the kalimba/mbira, guitar and a sampler playing samples recorded from vinyl records from Mali and South Africa and a collection of archival music recording traditional chants from around Southern and Eastern Africa (Pule described the live manipulation of effects on the samples as “a practice of handwriting through recorded sound, a traditional hip-hop methodology”). The varied beats and rhythms seemed to help us focus on movement. People talked but conversation wasn’t necessary. We all worked on our writing with different degrees and types of focus, some searching for the right message, others for the right forms or gestures or pens. We wrote individually, together. I found that at times the music was part of the ambience or fabric of the whole experience, while at other times it became a consciously active component in what I was doing, the beats shaping my flourishes and the curve of my lines.

I remember I had initially thought that I would find it difficult to decide what to write during the session, but I took inspiration from my two-year-old son Ben, who loves playing with his alphabet blocks and magnets. He puts them in order over and over again, and I always find it striking that he will immediately mess it up afterwards and start again. He clearly thinks of it as performative, rather than the creation of something static. And it relates to some recent research of mine too, on an early collection of Greek alphabetic inscriptions from Mount Hymettos, Athens, where a number of alphabetic sequences are attested among the dedications at the sanctuary of Zeus. I mentioned it to Alice a while ago, and she said maybe they inscribed the sequence because they were focusing on the act of writing rather than the content – a lovely insight that helped guide my investigation.

So, the first thing I did was to write an alphabetic sequence at the Jamigraphy session, and I did a few more later, experimenting with form and making alphabet spirals and snails sometimes. But I also wrote my name and contributed other words and phrases, sometimes in different scripts like Ditema tsa Dinoko, Bété, the Cypriot syllabary and the Greek alphabet. Every participant had their own ideas about how and what to write, diversifying the whole collective experience. How many scripts and languages can you spot in the images in this post and the videos below?

If you found this post interesting, I am pleased to say that we hope to keep collaborating in all sorts of ways, and to continue using Jamigraphy as a way of exploring writing conceptually, theoretically and practically. I can honestly say that it has opened my eyes (and ears) to new and innovative ways of thinking about the very core of my own research, and I am very grateful to everyone who played a role in making this event happen.

Alice will be speaking about our Jamigraphy session at the BLAG Meet on 25th April, a free online event. Register and views the programme here.

~ Pippa Steele (PI of the VIEWS project)

Postscript: some comments from our feedback forms (thank you so much to all the participants!)

A guest post in our Your Stories series, by Kwizera Mugisha, creator of the Umwero alphabet.

I. Introduction

The Umwero alphabet is an African alphabet that is able to write all Ntu-related languages, but it is specifically for Kinyarwanda.
“Everything needs a spirit to begin, and flesh to be revealed.” ~ Kwizera Mugisha.

All languages are spirits. As people, we are spirits, and spirit is invisible, but through flesh it becomes visible. This is how a person can be seen, and every person has his or her flesh. Kwizera Mugisha, after reading Genesis 11:1–9 and Daniel 5:25, understood that every language must have its own script as a flesh to reveal its spirit. In Rwandan traditions and beliefs, spirituality is the base. Let us now dive deep and learn about Umwero and how its characters are a real representation of Rwanda and the Kinyarwanda language.

After discovering that Kinyarwanda writing has been changing repeatedly since 1911, I examined the history of those reforms. Over time, several scholars and officials introduced modifications:

• 1911 – Priest Hurl E. made the first recorded changes.
• 1921–1931 – Further adjustments were introduced by Priest Schumacher P.
• 1939 – Another reform came under Bishop Classe L.
• 1946 – Priest Nkongoli L. proposed additional changes.
• 1974 – A new reform was introduced by Minister Bagaragaza Thaddée.
• 1985 – Minister Nsekalije Aloys introduced another change.
• 2012 – The Inteko of Culture made further modifications.
• 2024 – Another revision was made by Inteko of Culture.
  
  

All the above reasons made me create a stable writing system for Kinyarwanda that will remain consistent and preserve culture in language protection. During those periods of changes many words and other cultural things were lost accordingly.

II. Description of the Umwero in General

There is a saying in Kinyarwanda: “Izina ni ryo muntu,” meaning that a man’s name reveals who he is. Therefore, it is important to understand the meaning of Umwero. It does not only mean something as simple as a harvest. No, and when it is a harvest it is not in crops but in identity.

The name itself contains three pillars of Rwandan culture, which are Imana, Inka, and Ingoma (God, Cow, and Throne/Drums). When we take the name “Umwero” <U-mu-er/-o>, this ‘mu’ turns to ‘mw’ because it is followed by a vowel (a vowel cannot follow a vowel in Kinyarwanda), and we focus on the root which is “Ero.” It may take many forms which are ERA, EZE, ERO, so God is Holy meaning Imana Irera, cow’s milk is amata but respectfully called Ayera, and crop harvest we say yeze.

We now know how the name itself respects and reflects the culture; then we may ask ourselves, what about character by character? And the answer remains the same: Umwero is Kinyarwanda.

Umwero is an alphabetic writing system which is written from left to right. It is composed of 5 vowels and 44 consonants – 5 consonants which are special for languages like Kirundi and Kinyamulenge, so Kinyarwanda only uses 39 consonants, which produce a lot of Ibihekane (ligatures). Back to our point, some of those characters are based on my culture and others are just the creator’s creation, but all characters respect the measure of Umwero characters, which is 8 (8 means a lot in our culture). That is why the creator’s pure imagination characters look good with the cultural ones.

II.1 Characters and Culture II.1.1 Letter M and D

One for DATA/DAWE/Daye meaning father, the other for Mama/Mawe/Maye, so these two letters represent gender, where letter M reflects a womb (female), and letter D looks upward like a male symbol.

  II.1.2 Letter A and B

For letters B and A, we see the best Rwandan respected treasure, which is a cow of the type Inyambo.

Inyambo does not moo but baa, which we call kwabira. So Inyambo irabira. Then the Umwero letter B is the back part of a cow, while letter A is the head and horns.

In short, letter B stands for -abira from kwabira.

II.1.3 Letter CH

As in many cultures, a serpent is a symbol of wisdom. In Umwero a serpent is the letter CH for two reasons:

“Guca”: there is guca for passing in a way and guca for getting wisdom which we call “guca akenge.” Again, when you see a serpent standing, it shows a picture of a way too.

II.1.4 Letter R

Umwero letter R is for God, as God’s names include Ra, Rurema, Rugira; many of God’s names start with Ra. In the design I made a symbol that is like a pictograph of a person on their knees praying, then I rotated it to be seen well within the measurement of characters.

II.1.5 Hundreds Place Values

In Umwero numerals there is no such thing as zero, but all numbers are possible from 1 to decillions, and amazingly the four basic arithmetic operations are possible because I organized the system to respect place values while calculating.

The way for this is called growth of power, which is gukura kw’imbaraga. The beginning of all glyphs in Umwero is a circle, which reflects Life/God, because a circle has no starting nor ending point, so it is both the start and the end, and that is God.

When it comes to numbers, this circle stands for tens. For example, when 3 is inside it means thirty. For hundreds, the power grows to be a crown (Igisingo or Ikamba), the king’s crown.

From our ancient philosophy it says “Akami ka muntu ni umutima we,” meaning you are the king of yourself. I respected that idea, and because our founding father is called Gihanga Ngomijana, meaning Gihanga of one hundred thrones, I chose to make a crown stand for two different things:

I. To represent a proper noun and revive the above proverb
II. In numerals, to stand for hundreds, as our King Gihanga is of one hundred thrones, which protects his legacy.

“here I need a help from typographers because all font I have the proper noun ain’t respected like that except when I use a pen”

II.1.5 Umwero Last Character

We have been discussing the first Umwero glyph/character, which represents life, and Rwandan ancestors believe that life is black and white: night and day, life and death.

As the first shape represents life, the last shape represents death, and that shape stands for the sound or consonant “PF.” Death in Kinyarwanda is Urupfu.

It is a circle, but a line passes through it to show the destruction of life.

III. Who Uses Umwero, Teaching, and Digitization

The Umwero alphabet is currently used by small groups of people. From 2022, I started experimental teaching by introducing Umwero to my two little brothers and their friend, until they became five children. My brothers also shared the knowledge with a few of their friends at school, though I will not count them.

In 2023, through my posts on Facebook and Twitter, someone called Mucyo, a Rwandan living in another country, learned Umwero by himself using my tweets and connected with me by sending Umwero texts written with both pen and a keyboard. The keyboard was very helpful to him, as he said. This experience showed me that anyone can learn Umwero anywhere on their own.

In 2024, I was appointed as secretary of a small church, and I introduced Umwero to the church children, teaching them as well. I remember there were about 12 children. Later that year, I had an opportunity to present Umwero on television, which brought the script to the attention of a wider audience. I then created YouTube video tutorials, allowing people from different areas, even in the diaspora, to learn Umwero. Some learners reached out to me for guidance and corrections, while others continued learning independently.

As most studies are online and I do not yet have a personal database, I am not sure how many students there are, but I can say with confidence that the community is growing day by day. From what I have observed, Umwero is especially loved by people who value culture and Kinyarwanda, as well as by those who want privacy in writing. While some learn it with less noble motivations, I continue teaching because I know the direction I am guiding them toward.

I teach both in person and online, but I prefer online teaching because it can reach learners everywhere. After discovering that people can learn independently, I decided to build Uruziga, a dedicated learning platform for Umwero.

Since I am busy with my studies, physical classes are currently difficult, except occasionally. The Uruziga platform will help track how many students are learning, their progress, and their performance. I am now preparing to build a dataset, which will later allow me to create an OCR system for Umwero. The final step in the digitization process will be submitting a Unicode proposal, ensuring that Umwero can be used widely on digital devices.

~ by Kwizera Mugisha

 

You never really know, when you organise a conference, what it will be like. But I wasn’t quite prepared for this to be the BANGING conference it turned out to be, as one participant described it! And I feel both delighted with and humbled by the feedback from everyone who took part. I can’t recount everything, so I will use this blog post to share some reflections on the conference, and of course some pictures!

WAVE 2 took place over four days in person in Cambridge with a hybrid audience (26th-29th March) and one day fully online (11th April). The theme for the conference, Writing As Visual Engagement, was interpreted by the presenters in many different ways, and it was a real joy to experience the diversity of topics, scripts and places on the agenda.

We started on the Thursday afternoon with an inspiring paper on the “Betaverse” by Tim Brookes, set to musical accompaniment from Pule kaJanolintji and Alice Mazzilli: a powerful call to action that reminded us of the individuality of handwriting and the humanity behind it. I’m very sad that we didn’t manage to capture the audio properly (the musical element was a rather late development), so it will remain forever as a performance where you quite literally had to be there. But maybe that says something about the performativity of handwriting too.

Aaron Koller then looked at the aesthetics of writing, comparing the traditions of the Roman serif, Arabic calligraphy and Hebrew micrography as different ways of harnessing alphabetic writing for visual effects. Jordan Miller explored the lines of Egyptian writing, in multiple senses, from the “furrows” they followed to the outlines of hieroglyphic signs. Oreen Yousuf introduced the Minim Dag Noore script of Burkina Faso and neighbouring countries, whose direction of reading can be left-to-right or right-to-left depending on training, with text either in ALL CAPS or all lowercase. Kasia Mikulska used the intriguing manuscript Aubin 20 to demonstrate the intricate graphic respresentation of the Mesoamerican cosmos in the context of divinatory practices. And Joanna Homrighausen entertained us with the tale of the book of Esther through the script and style choices of JT Waldman’s graphic novel.

After a whirlwind opening to the conference, we all headed to the Cast Gallery (AKA the Museum of Classical Archaeology, which is the prettiest part of our Faculty building) for drinks, nibbles, chatting and group photos.

The Friday got off to a flying start with Aleksandra Twardokęs’s discussion of stylistic choices in band logos and album covers. Bálint Berémenyi followed with a reaqnalysis of the concept of “retrograde” writing in Egyptian, where passages of text read contrary to the expected direction, always with some contextual motivation. Josh Fitzgerald explored the speech scrolls of Mesoamerican writing from a comparative perspective, a quite literal entanglement of orality and writing. Then Yanru Xu looked at the bird signs of Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Naxi-Dongba Script and Chinese Oracle Bone Inscriptions, discussing their specificity and comparing strategies across the three scripts.

The morning was rounded off by Kevin Graaf’s talk on the challenges and opportunities of digitising hieroglyphic scripts and their complex arrangements of the signs, demonstrating his Dubsar program as used to type Mayan – which has rather quickly become our most viewed ever video on YouTube! And then we stopped for lunch to refresh our mental energy for the afternoon.

After lunch we started with a magsterial demonstration by Jade Wang-Szilas of the MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) she developed for Dongba script, concentrating on the visual choices made around presenting the signs and their role in the wider graphoculture. Then Hanny Imania presented her work with Javanese, and the challenges of typographic encoding of the markers of social hierarchy contained in the script. Helen Magowan followed by looking at the reduction in allographic variation in Japanese in conjunction with the eventual adoption of moveable type in the 19th century, which conversely made earlier Japanese writing all but unreadable for modern Japanese readers. Her incorporation of Hokusai’s Wave did not go unnoticed! Albert Davletshin followed with a remote presentation on the different kinds of pictorial signs in a writing system like Mayan, requiring different kinds of visual thinking to understand their meaning. Finally Merten a Campo analysed the directional features of some of the earliest attestations of writing from Crete, alongside related problems of sign orientation and graphic composition in the context of minute seal surfaces.

On the Saturday we braced ourselves for another day of riveting content, which began with perhaps the best pairing of the whole conference: Alice Mazzilli’s interowriting followed by Pule kaJanolintji’s interoreading. Alice demonstrated the problems with confining writing to a lens dominated by cartesian dualism of mind and body, writing and art, reframing writing as a relational process in which gesture, mark, tension, space, attention and perception co-constitute a mode of being; it is through non-being, through chora, that meaning is revealed. Pule picked up these threads as he described the philosophy of ||Kabbo, a South African |Xam sage who related the way in which, when the name or sign for a thing matches its image or concept, a person feels it inside their body as a true sign (|ʼam̩), as affect – a completely different ontological approach from the western dominant Aristotelian model; he followed this through the design and use of the Ditema tsa Dinoko script. Alice and Pule’s collaboration even resulted in a new symbol, which you can see below: growing out of an intersection between chora and its Italian translation luogo, and then placed at the intersection of ||o and ||e, I and You, where the potentiality of escape into nothingness exists.

In the next session Colton Siegmund showed the statues of Gudea from ancient Lagaš, whose cuneiform text avoids the area of the buttocks – a clear design decision rooted in concepts of hegemonic masculinity. Mia Pancotti then introduced the ancient Greek stoichedon style of writing, with its curious choice to lay out text in perfect grids such that every letter lined up beautifully, but reading became not unlike picking out individual words from a wordsearch puzzle. It was particularly wonderful that Mia included my son Ben in one of her slides, in honour of his favourite occupation: laying out the alphabetic sequence in aesthetically pleasing arrangements!

We were very much ready for an extra long lunch break by this point, which included a beautiful jamming session by Tim and Pule while people participated in jamigraphy (on which concept see this earlier post) alongside sandwiches, cakes and conversation. I was really thrilled to see people joining in with these exercises in group writing, both adding their own contributions to sheets of paper hung on the wall and making extra name badges with their names in different scripts. There was so much good feeling, and so many smiles, a real pleasure to witness.

After lunch, Yue Chen introduced the minority Yi script of China, describing its history and extensive variability as well as the challenges of digitisation of the traditional ideographic script. Then Jordan Williams gave us a lesson in reframing our expectations of and approaches to writing, showing us how to identify and understand meaning in a modern revival of ideographic Nsibidi, a script originating from Nigeria/Cameroon but surfacing through the diaspora in the Caribbean and America. Campbell Rosener opened the final session of the day with her presentation of the OIMOI corpus from ancient Selinous, Sicily, where gravestones used this striking word alongside choices of layout and negative space to evoke memory and absence. Finally, John Mawby delivered a presentation put together by Lida Lopes Cardozo and Roxanne Kindersley about the work of the Cardozo Kindersley stonecutting workshop here in Cambridge, and their work to use materials, tools and stylistic choices to make letters quite literally last.

Sunday came all too soon, the last (half-)day of the in-person conference, beginning with Mnemosyne Rice’s discussion of Linear A inscriptions on stone, and the technical choices that led to their visual differences from the perhaps better known inscriptions on clay. Daniel Yacob then introduced us to the use of colour – particularly rubrication – in the Ethiopic tradition, whose long history is ongoing as shown in its incorporation even in some modern digitally printed works. Chunfeng Zhang looked at the reading order of Naxi Dongba texts, particularly the differences between those with fictional and factual focus. Bárbaro Martínez-Ruiz gave a stunning account of his expeditions in Angola studying Kongo graphic writing, whose very principles of constructing meaning require us to set aside any preconceptions and attempt to understand the cosmological, epistemological and social frameworks that engender their significance. Finally David Osgarby demonstrated the validity and importance of a grapholinguistic and sociolinguistic approach to Pictish writing as well as its visual interactions with other contemporary scripts.

Enriched, stimulated and completely exhausted – and following lots more photos and sad farewells – we all then needed a two week break before the final day of the conference, which took place online on Saturday 11th April. The day began with a paper by Roland Buckingham-Hsiao on Chinese calligraphy, with a particular emphasis on writing as something that is performed physically and socially. Dániel Takács then discussed the life of Egyptian hieroglyphic signs, both in the sense of their creation and interaction with wider visual culture, and in their vitality and perceived ability to act in the world. Hannah Sophie Schier approached the so-called “Mixed Ductus”, a particular style used in Akkadian cuneiform writing at the Hittite capital of Hattusa, as a deliberate elite strategy and diplomatic choice. We then had rather a long conversation during the lunch break chat session about what different people working in different disciplines understand by the word ductus – part of a long and ongoing debate over writing terminology!

In the final session of the whole conference, Nicole Hockmann introduced Old East Slavic writing on birch bark documents, considering what they can tell us about the complex interaction of spoken and written language. Aren Wilson-Wright then looked at the pictorial origins of Early Alphabetic letters, only some of which are confidently identified with Egyptian hieroglyphs or particular images or objects, in search of an elusive methodology to identify those whose origins are less obvious. Finally, Clara Martínez-Moreno presented a number of Egyptian medical remedies attested in papyrus documents that recommended writing on the body as part of a medical remedy, sometimes showing exactly what should be written – a rare insight into an “embodied” practice of writing that has otherwise left little trace.

With that the conference was over, but it will, I hope, have a lasting legacy. The proceedings will be published in our open access series with De Gruyter, an endeavour that will inevitably take a bit of time. In the meantime, if any of the above brief descriptions of participants’ papers have piqued your interest, remember that you can watch almost all of them on the YouTube playlist, or navigate to individual videos by clicking on the titles in the programme HERE. 

I want to finish with a few notes about my personal takeaways from the conference. I was really blown away by the high quality, richness and diversity of all the presentations. All of the papers, in one form or another, emphasised that in order to understand writing practices in any given place at any given time, you really need to try to understand in depth the full cultural, social, epistemological, practical and material contexts in which they were or are taking place. A number of the writing traditions presented are seriously under-studied, while others might not even be considered writing in a strict glottographic or grapholinguistic sense (NB there is much further terminological debate to be had on these issues!). It was important to me that we did not put up boundaries between one tradition and another, and sure enough what emerged were numerous connections and similarities across scripts of all types and origins. And I was particularly delighted that we had such a great representation of African scripts, since this is an area where I am also developing research – and here we have a whole continent whose rich and diverse history of writing has been almost completely overlooked in scholarship.

Finally, I want to say both how grateful I am to everyone who played a role in making this conference happen, both behind and in front of the scenes, and how humbled I am by the feedback I’ve received from participants. A few anonymised snippets can be seen below. Knowing the the people in the room felt welcome, inspired, supported and happy means such a great deal to me.

At the end, I was honoured to be presented with a special carving by Tim, pictured below. He later sent me this description: “Ananse is the clever spider of African folklore, and this is his web. In some interpretations, this symbol represents wisdom, craftiness, creativity, and the complexities of life. In others, it stands for the interconnectedness of the community, the fact that everyone depends on everyone else, and that one person cannot be affected without affecting everyone. In my version, the carving tool has left lines that make it look like a seven-petal flower, a rarity in nature. Carved in maple, March 2026.” I am all for embracing complexities – which I think was central to this conference – but I am even more grateful to be thought of as standing central to this incredible interconnected community of extremely lovely, clever and fascinating people. Thank you all!

~ Pippa Steele (PI of the VIEWS project)

And a few more pics in which I tried to get in on everyone’s photos

I recently published an article about writing on Mount Hymettos over the last (nearly) 3,000 years – a bit of a departure for me personally because I was trying out some new place-centred approaches to practised writing. Then a couple of weeks ago when I was playing with my son with his Duplo, I realised I could recreate many of the scenes with resources we already had! So here we are, a Duplo tribute to writing on Mount Hymettos, in honour of International Lego Classics Day. Along the way, there was also a very exciting intervention by way of a Lego research session led by our Visiting Fellow Helen Magowan… But let’s begin by talking about the mountain.

You can read my research article, “Mount Hymettos, Athens: A Holy Place for Writing”, HERE.

The city of Athens has a long-standing relationship with its natural surroundings, of which one of the most striking features is Mount Hymettos – not a pointy, singular sort of a mountain, but a 16-km long, hulking mass of rock stretching all the way down the city’s east side to the Saronic Gulf. In classical times it was especially known for two natural products: a bluish marble that was quarried there, and honey that was purportedly the best in the Mediterranean, courtesy of its thyme-fed bees.

Below you can see Hymettos in the distance, as seen from the Acropolis in the very centre of Athens. Its main peak is in view towards the left side of the picture, but you would be forgiven for thinking that it doesn’t stand out very much from the rest of the mountain. Nevertheless, that peak was home to an important sanctuary to Zeus, where the largest collection of early Greek alphabetic inscriptions has been found. We don’t have any surviving Greek alphabetic inscriptions that date earlier than the second half of the 8th century BCE, while these examples from Mount Hymettos date to the mid 7th century BCE – some 200 years before Classical Greek writers like Plato or Euripides. Out of around 700 inscriptions dated to the 8th-7th centuries BCE, a massive 150 come from the Hymettos sanctuary, almost all inscribed on ceramic cups.

The Greek writer Pausanias tells us that there was an altar to Zeus Ombrios, literally Zeus of the Rain, on the mountain. That makes sense because Hymettos acts as a weather vain for the city, an indicator of what is to come. The inscriptions from the sanctuary don’t mention Zeus Ombrios though, they refer to Zeus Semios: Zeus of the Sign. One of the things I am very interested in in my research at the moment is the concept of the sema (the word from which Semios derives) in this period. It is possible that there was an early link between the word sema and the letters of the alphabet – which is actually something I’ve recreated in Lego before, focusing on the only reference to writing in the Iliad, where the word sema is specifically used.

The inscribed cups have three distinct features that suggest that writing was an important act for the activities from the sanctuary:

1. The mention of Zeus Semios
2. Several examples of inscribed alphabetic sequences (ΑΒΓΔΕ… etc)
3. Several inscriptions that specify “X wrote this” or similar.

My suspicion is that writing actually took place as part of the ritual activities at the sanctuary. This could help to explain why seemingly low value ceramic cups were considered worthy offerings to Zeus – it was not the object but the writing it bore that was the most important part of the dedication.

The sanctuary of Zeus Semios is not the only place where people have performed the act of writing on Mount Hymettos – far from it – and the article I linked to at the beginning of the post turned into something of a homage to writing on the mountain from the 7th century BCE to the present day. There are plenty of caves and rocky outcrops that have attracted graffiti ancient and modern – one of which (the one with the earliest evidence of human habitation in fact) is the Liontari Cave, where a fearsome lion is said to have lived, using it as a base to terrorise the surrounding area. He looks quite tame to me though!

Some of the more recent writings on the mountain have been made by visitors who go there to hike or see the wildlife (it’s a popular escape from the city for Athenians, as well as a tourist location). I particularly love the colourful signs from the botanical trail, naming plant species for curious viewers, though I didn’t manage to recreate those in Duplo.

Campers are probably safe from the legendary lion, but you never know…

One interesting trend is that writing is often found in settings that are associated with religious or ritual practice. There are numerous monasteries, for instance, which would have been important sites for producing and disseminating the written word. The earliest known Christian building, the church of Agios Markos with its 6th century CE basilica, provided the inspiration for the Duplo scene below.

The murals of the Kaisariani monastery are particularly evocative, with their painted inscriptions and depictions of books and scrolls – a reminder of the huge numbers of medieval texts that didn’t survive. In fact we know that many of Kaisariani’s manuscripts were scrapped in the 19th century during the Greek War of Independence, taken to be used as military supplies like cartridge wadding.

One of my favourite examples is the Vari Cave, which has numerous inscriptions from the 5th century BCE as well as more recent ones. Some of the inscriptions tell us that a person named Archedamos cultivated the cave in honour of the nymphs by whom he was possessed. He is referred to as a Nympholept, literally a person taken by the nymphs. Archedamos is even depicted with hammer and chisel in the act of carving or inscribing, and the cave has a wonderful mix of natural features and human-added elements that respect the natural arrangement of the living rock. You have to imagine any human activity in the cave as being conditioned by its special surroundings, from eerie echoes to the flicker of flames in the gloom – it’s no wonder people felt it had some numinous quality. Lord Byron is probably the most famous person known to have visited the cave, but people have been visiting and even scratching their names on its walls for 2,500 years.

After spending months researching writing on Mount Hymettos, it has been both fun and therapeutic to try to recreate some of its scenes in Duplo, with the added fun of playing with my two-year old son Ben. At this point, however, I want to mention an important formative Lego-related occasion, for me and other members of my research group, which happened just last Thursday.

Our Visiting Fellow Helen Magowan, who is an expert in early modern Japanese writing and calligraphy, happens to have trained as a Lego Serious Play facilitator – essentially using Lego in the workplace for things like planning, teambuilding and other strategic purposes. It has huge potential for use in research, and we were delighted to road-test some ideas in a sort of taster session. We made small models in response to prompts to test the waters, and then we got to try building little scenes that represented our research on writing. Below you can see a gallery showing some scenes from the exercise, culminating in a collective effort to link our scenes together. (Participants were Helen Magowan, me, Jeiran Jahani, Emily Patterson, Yanru Xu and Tim Brookes.)

I could go on for hours about how stimulating and inspiring the session was – and fantastic fun too! – but instead I’m just going to show one little tableau I made, because it ties in with the theme of this post so nicely. Below you can see my attempt to represent the early adoption of alphabetic writing in Greece, using a quite random selection of Lego pieces we had to hand.

Let me explain because it’s not obvious to begin with! There are two people drinking from “cups” represented by clear-plastic round pieces. One person has two heads, because writing has opened up some interesting possibilities about how you represent people and things. Some of the inscribed cups from Hymettos and elsewhere are what we call “speaking objects”, featuring inscriptions that speak in the first person as if the object itself is speaking. For instance, one of the Hymettos examples says “I belong to Zeus but X wrote me” (the name is missing in a break in the pottery, sadly!). It is almost as if an extra voice is being created simply by the act of writing it into existence. This way of representing it felt like a flash of inspiration for my current research.

The second thing to note is that the person at the front of the scene has decided to do something a bit different and is writing on a stone monument. They’re also holding a telephone, to represent the power of writing to transmit ideas across time and space (sometimes known as “asynchronous communication”). What I find really interesting is that writing on stone was not something that existed in Greece before the 8th and especially the 7th century BCE (though it had been around longer in Anatolia and the Levant), when it suddenly became a popular medium. The “monumentalisation” of writing is on our agenda at the moment, as our remote Visiting Fellow Anna Bertelli is giving a talk about law codes written on temple walls in Archaic Crete next week (27th February: see here).

The story of writing on Mount Hymettos nicely encapsulates many of the issues I’ve been thinking about in early Greek alphabetic writing recently, from the early inscribing of drinking cups in communal settings to the developing relationships between humans and the land, and the peculiar ability of humans to quite literally inscribe themselves into the mountain. I hope you have enjoyed the journey and its Duplo/Lego illustrations. And if you want to follow up and read the published version of the article this is based on, you can find it HERE.

Now I wish you a very happy International Lego Classics Day, and please do stop and have a play yourself if you get the chance – you might be surprised what ideas you come up with! Please do share them with us, we’re always delighted to see people’s creations.

~ Pippa Steele (PI of the VIEWS project), in collaboration with her tiny playmate Ben who kindly let her (and helped her) play with his Duplo

This Friday, 23rd January, is one of the biggest days of our year: World Endangered Writing Day (WEWD), an annual celebration of the diversity of global writing traditions. It is also a call to address the inequalities and threats that lead to the endangerment of some 90% of the world’s diverse scripts, and the languages and cultures associated with them

This year, I will be co-hosting with founder Tim Brookes, and we have a full day of online events planned, with something for everyone. I am honoured to be starting the day with some personal reflections on the study of writing endangerment, and what led me to direct my research towards this much overlooked issue. You can browse the programme below, and click on the button to register.

Register for WEWD 2026

WEWD 2026 programmeDownload

I am also delighted to announce that we have just published our first VIEWSletter, which you can download below. It contains news about the project and our publications, notices about upcoming events, links to blog posts, images and, even more exciting, a round-up of news from our Discord server community – including calls for papers for upcoming conferences elsewhere, publications of interest and community news. We hope you enjoy it, and please share it with anyone who might be interested. The next issue is planned for after our conference (probably April or May).

VIEWSletter issue 1Download

As always, get in touch (views@classics.cam.ac.uk) if you have any questions or news to share, or if you want to join our mailing list.

~ Pippa Steele (PI of the VIEWS project)

We are excited to announce our programme of VIEWS project and Endangered Writing Research Network events for the coming months. Find out about our one-day events, register for our seminars and browse the programme for our upcoming conference – all below.

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World Endangered Writing Day: Friday 23rd January

Join Tim Brookes, Pippa Steele and a range of colleagues all over the world to celebrate global diversity in writing traditions. A day of specialist presentations and discussion events and more.

Browse the schedule and register HERE.

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Seminars Friday 30th January, 4.30pm GMT ONLINE ONLY

Reading, Riting, Rithmetic and 1+2=??? The varied roots of quirky sign ordering in Indic orthographies (Christopher Miller) (Abstract here and handout here)

Friday 27th February, 4.30pm GMT ONLINE ONLY

Looking at the Inscribed Temple: Reconstructing Viewer Experience at the Sanctuary of Apollo Pythios in Gortyn, Crete (Anna Bertelli)

Friday 6th March, 4.30pm GMT IN PERSON + ONLINE

Writing as Image: A Comparative Visual Study of Bété and Chinese Scripts (Adam Yeo)

Location for in-person attendance: Room 1.11, Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge

Zoom registration for the Seminars

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Jamigraphy workshop: Saturday 21st March Jamigraphy: Writing as Rhythm, Movement, and Embodiment

A participatory workshop led by Alice Mazzilli where writing meets music, held in collaboration with CRASSH and the Cambridge Festival.

More information HERE (we will make a further announcement when registration opens).

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WAVE 2 Conference: 26th-29th March + 11th April Writing As Visual Engagement

The second VIEWS project conference, with 30+ papers on global writing traditions, from the ancient world to the modern day, with a great variety of perspectives and approaches to visual and visible aspects of writing.

More information HERE (including the programme and registration information)

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You may also want to look out for the Linguists Collective Conference and International Mother Language Day on 21st February, where Pippa is giving a paper (all online, programme and free registration here).

We hope you will be interested in attending some of our events, and if you have any questions about any of them, please just get in touch (views@classics.cam.ac.uk). We look forward to seeing you!

I didn’t manage to write a post before taking a break for Christmas (sorry), but after having a particularly writing-themed festive season, I thought some of my experiences might be of interest. Read on for some book recommendations and ideas for fun craft activities (generally involving my two-year-old too). Written in the style of an excited gift receiver and not a professional academic book reviewer!

(You’ll find out near the end why the post is headed with an image of 17th century graffiti.)

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Stories of Abjad by Joumana Medlej is a rather gorgeous book – but also one with great depth. The author is herself a professional calligrapher whose research builds on her practice, bringing a wealth of perceptive insights that are really rooted in experience. She introduces the history of the Arabic script from a perspective I had not thought about very much before, in its close relationship with the development of the numeration system, which also introduces the different ways in which the alphabet has been ordered (which was particularly riveting for me) as well as cosmological frameworks. This felt like a much more comprehensive approach than the usual epigraphic descriptions of changes in sign shape and repertoire in relation to Nabataean and earlier writing traditions.

The following treatment of sign shapes, focused on what is generally known as Kufic style (a not unproblematic term relating to a whole family of scripts), gives a range of architectural and manuscript examples of each letter. Having previously found stylised Kufic scripts difficult to fathom, I was pleasantly surprised to come away with a much better understanding of how the letter shapes relate to each other and which ones can have particular kinds of flourishes – there is a pleasing internal logic to be unlocked. Even better, each letter is accompanied by an artistic representation (reflecting its numerical value) in Joumana’s distinctive style (with dyes and other materials made from scratch – follow her on Bluesky for more on these fascinating processes).

You can buy Stories of Abjad here.

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Talk Like an Aztec: A Hieroglyph Book with Stencils is a British Museum publication by Nina Chakrabarti. It’s a children’s book, giving an overview of Aztec culture and introducing their pictographic writing system used historically for Nahuatl (you can see my son Ben with it below). It doesn’t try too hard to explain how Aztec writing works, other than to explain that each sign represents a whole word or concept, and some could have several different meanings – just enough, I think, to pique young curiosity. (A good follow up for interested people of any age would be Gordon Whittaker’s beautifully illustrated Deciphering Aztec Hieroglyphs).

One of the selling points of the book is the set of stencils included, which are meant to help you draw your own Aztec signs – but unfortunately they’re a bit hit and miss. There is a list of signs to check against the stencils so that you can see what they’re meant to look like. For some you have to add a lot of extra detail to make them recognisable (e.g. my jaguar, bottom left; the top two on the right are meant to be a rabbit and dog but don’t really match the details on the versions in the list). Others just give internal details and not the whole outline. There’s no guide to how to use the stencils, but I would definitely avoid crayon (too thick) and go for a felt tip or art pen, something with a fine point for the smallest ones. Generally I would say that if you want them to look good you’d be better copying illustrations in the book, but the stencils are fun!

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Another fun book is Look! What Do You See? by the Chinese artist Xu Bing, famous for his works that play with the appearance and meaning of the written word. Labelled as an “art puzzle book”, this work challenges the reader to understand words written in English and in the Roman alphabet, but arranged in such a way that they look like Chinese characters. From a distance, squinting perhaps, you could mistake them for Chinese writing, but on closer inspection it becomes possible to pick out the letters to spell out English words.

To help with decoding, the book mainly consists of a series of American and Chinese folk songs, many of which will be familiar more widely. Can you make out the one in the picture? There is also a nice section at the end explaining the letter shapes used and the spatial logic for combining them into blocks – but I think that’s too much of a spoiler to reproduce here! It’s a fun book (and also a very tall one, too big for my bookshelf!).

I couldn’t find a publisher page so here is its Amazon listing where we got it.

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I always like doing something crafty when I have spare time, and this year I decided stamping would be fun, and something Ben and I could try together. I found the kit above online, with 24 stamps for single-consonant Egyptian hieroglyphs (basically the set commonly used today as a hieroglyphic “alphabet” for people to try), and I also got a rainbow ink pad and a lovely set of Roman alphabet stamps with wooden handles as a present – which were quickly appropriated by Ben so that he could arrange them in alphabetical order (he’s not entirely convinced by the idea of using them to stamp yet).

I didn’t put a huge amount of effort into our printing, but it was fun trying them out and we’ll certainly play with them plenty more. You can always use them with plasticine or air drying clay if you’d rather not mess about with the ink. I thought my little pseudohieroglyphic inscription below turned out quite well anyway! There’s something about getting the layout right, especially stacking wider signs alongside single taller ones and making it look like they’re in blocks, that creates a faint air of authenticity…

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I am very lucky to have loved ones who understand me well enough to buy me writing books and toys for Christmas! I also just want to include two books that were not actually presents but that I got to catch up on over the holidays…

Why Q Needs U by Danny Bate is the sort of book I ought to resent because I would have loved to have written it myself. I’m always telling stories of the development of particular letters of the Roman and related alphabets, basically to anyone who will listen (they usually regret it after a while). And here comes a book with all the stories – and more – in one place!

Seriously though, this is a fantastic read, and gives the best of both worlds: entertaining at the same time as being immaculately researched. It’s written for the general reader, avoiding unnecessary jargon and presenting information plainly and with humour. If you happen to be an expert epigraphist or linguist it might not be pitched quite right for you – though, saying that, I find it quite refreshing and enjoy the enhanced accessibility. I tended to dip in and out at will, which is perfectly possible since each letter of the alphabet has its own chapter. But there is actually a benefit in reading it from start to finish, especially if you’re less familiar with the historical context, so that you build up an understanding of the Egyptian, Greek, Etruscan, Latin and other writing traditions that play important roles as you go along.

You can buy Why Q Needs U from various outlets, see here for options, and follow Danny on Bluesky here.

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By Hand by my good friend Tim Brookes is a lovely note to end on. Written in his inimitably eclectic style, this is both a compendium and a very personal journey (with a surprise ending that I won’t spoil for you) all in one. The topic is handwriting, something we probably all do less than we used to, and for many of us less than we’d like. There is something so personal about one’s handwriting style – we all tend to learn a standardised version of our script, and yet when we use a pen or other writing implement, what comes out is completely individual. (A concept that I believe will feature in Tim’s paper at our conference in March, on which more news soon!)

In part this is an ode to the dying art of handwriting, extolling the virtues of reviving it, from the barely tangible feelings of satisfaction it can bring to its demonstrable health and wellbeing benefits. But it also avoids the trap of talking about nothing but western writing and western values, showcasing global scripts and diverse styles and traditions of calligraphy. Every page brings a new observation – a real treasure trove.

You can buy By Hand here and follow Tim on Bluesky here.

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We rounded off our festive season with an inscription-hunting new year visit to King’s College Chapel…

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… and a visit to the Made in Ancient Egypt exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, which I can’t recommend highly enough. It has a fantastic array of objects, showcasing Egyptian craftsmanship on the one hand, while bringing out a wealth of personalities and stories behind the objects on the other. It’s nice and bright and spacious with lots of interactive and animated features too. It’s on until April, go if you can!

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And with that I will wish you a happy new (Gregorian) year. Look out for lots more news soon, from our first VIEWSletter to announcements about the programmes for World Endangered Writing Day 2026 and our March conference Writing As Visual Engagement.

~ Pippa Steele (PI of the VIEWS project)

A story for All Hallows’ Eve by Tian Tian

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“But the rest, countless plagues, wander amongst men; for earth is full of evils, and the sea is full.”

This is the very sentence emerged in my head, like a pale dead fish surfaced from the boundless dark waters, when I was in that fiendish lecture room of Old Dunmarrow, Northeastern Scotland. What has carried me to this point was a mix of unpredictable fate, unwavering curiosity, unforgivable hubris and unfathomable antiquity.

I

Years after stumbling among failed job applications as an Egyptologist, I eventually secured a post-doctoral fellowship at Miskatonic University, in the Arkham, Massachusetts. Life in the New England has been unadventurous, particularly for a post-doc conducting the digitalisation of the special manuscript collection in the university library. My appetite for curious ancient writings had remained unslaked despite years of frustration, and when pages of those unspeakable manuscripts appeared in high resolutions on my screen, I relished every line of them: those from the scandalous cultist Wilbur Whateley, bequeathed to the collection by Henry Armitage in 1929; unpublished reports from the Miskatonic Antarctic Expedition of 1930–31 and notes and photographic plates from Professor Peaslee’s ill-fated expedition to the western deserts of Australia in 1935. And of course, that well-known Necronomicon by Alhazred from 730s CE—one of the only few Latin copies still around in this world. Due to their unsightly and uncanny nature, I was asked only to digitalise them without publishing the pages in Open Access. But the morbid curiosity and lethal pride that belongs to a perverse collector drove me to save them in my laptop, while I wrote about those monstrous hieroglyphs in academic journals.

And then came that day, September 14th 2014, when I received an email from the Elphinstone College in Dunmarrow, inviting me to deliver a lecture on hieroglyphs in H.P. Lovecraft stories on the All Hallows’ Eve. They seemed reasonable and persuasive, as I am indeed the only scholar who has worked on those nightmarish manuscripts Lovecraft has mentioned in his maddening stories. And on top of sweet compliment, I was promised a field trip to curious Pictish sites around. So, after hours of flights and train rides, in a foggy morning I arrived in this port city hanging in the northeast of Britain. The lecture would be at 18:00, so I took a casual walk in the town, starting with the harbour. There, with long-abandoned Victorian warehouses in the foreground, I saw the peculiar baronial tower of the city hall, half-emerged hauntingly from the grey fog, and next to it, like a menace, the gaunt Neo-Perpendicular Gothic tower of Elphinstone College loomed high. Its wide niches were two monstrous mouths with fangs, opening up to reveal only mysterious blackness.

Oddly, I was asked to deliver the lecture in the Town Hall of the Old Dunmarrow, the medieval section of this city. On my way there I saw those old buildings of giant granite blocks: unpolished, bulky, grey — like the belated imitation of some cyclopean marine city. And the squat Town Hall from 1789 was built with the same silver granite, and only the slightly polished quoin maintained a contrived Georgian elegance. In the slanting light of the dying sun the lecture hall looked strangely foreshortened, as though a portion of its space lay hidden behind the podium and the dark-panelled wall. In the retreating light I made out a few curios in the room: A row of saw-fish beaks, brown-stained by years and salt air, lined the chimney-piece. From the shadowed shelves, jars of pale spirit-liquid held the stares of deep-sea creatures: a Chauliodus sloani brandishing its needle-like teeth, a Anoplogaster cornuta frozen in a sluggish grimace, and some bloated and scaly Bathynomus giganteus sharing a cramped jar. And just next to the podium, on top of a black stone pedestal, a dusty glass case protected some strange pieces of gold, their chased patterns unlike anything that even the most seasoned archaeologist could recognise. Just as I was absent-mindedly connecting my laptop to the projector, the audience seeped in by twos and threes until the cramped room was full. Their features, caught in the wan light reminded me of those preserved denizens of the deep that stared from the shelves.

There were only a dozen of them, all looking straightly forward with their hollow, faintly bulging eyes. I tried to explain away their odd appearance by telling myself they must be hard-working folk from the harbour. Many had already lost most of their hair; their skin looked bleached and weathered by years of sea-wind. The younger ones among them wore over-sized casual hoodies, while one rather shy fellow kept his hood up and his face lowered, slumped like any bored college student. An elderly gentleman all dressed in a rather wretched formal suit and tattered shirt—an antique fashion that, in an uncanny way, suited the eighteenth-century Old Town Hall. Yet they all looked tired, lifeless and indifferent, as if someone has dragged them from works to my lecture. And last of all, an eye-catching old man, wearing red-and-black ceremonial robes entered. He must be a civic dignitary for a massive gold chain hung about his shoulders. Yet, it is unlike any of those I have seen in museums: the centre medallion bore not the crest of Dunmarrow but a strange chased design which, for a few minutes, stirred in me a haunting sense of recognition that I could not place. In spite of their apathetic mood and slow movements, the audience chatted with each other, shifting their round, protruding eyes to me from time to time.

II

The host, equally stiff and bald like audience, gave a short introduction of me, before revealing the identity of the distinguished gentleman in a nasal-heavy accent. “We are especially honoured this evening,” he announced, “by the presence of the Right Honourable the Lord Provost, who has graciously consented to join us in our venerable Old Town Hall rather than the more commodious chamber in the new City Hall”. Rather surprisingly, the audience applauded weakly as if they had seen the Lord Provost as an old acquaintance daily in pub. Certainly, another reason was that many of them hid their hand in their jacket pockets. I did not think too much about these oddities and decided to kick start.

“Howard Phillips Lovecraft, the world famous American writer from the early 20th century, has left us with a series of horror and weird writings about ancient beings, cosmic creatures and sinister cults. Now almost a century has passed, the charm of his stories diminished not even a little. Indeed, he was a skilful writer, creating a realistic narration by incorporating the unconventional careers of academic staffs from Miskatonic University; and also, what concerns us today, by using the unusual manuscripts and reports in the University library—bravo, I would say”.

As I warmed to my theme, I started to scan my audience’s reaction in the dimly illuminated room. Some pairs of bulging eyes still stared fixedly at me — or perhaps at the space just behind me — while a few, especially the younger ones in hoodies, seemed on the verge of dozing off, their heads lolling forward. Then I made a remark that unexpectedly roused them.

“Yet, as you must have already realised, as a serious scholar, I think these writings of ancient beings, the Great Old Ones, the saurian creatures in the desert, are all just imagination, hearsay, ancient myth from manuscripts… maybe some exaggerated and delusional misinterpretations from reports… Vivid, no doubt, but fake…”. Just as this sentence came out of my lips, I detected some faint disturbance among my audience. They looked at me, and shifted their gaze to one another. The young one in the hoodie also suddenly raised his head and looked at me for the very first time. For a moment I fancied that his face lacked a proper nose—it must be the trick of the light. Then, a weak whispering sound reached my ear, in a vocal articulation unknown among human, rather hoarse and throaty:

Then it faded into the thin air, while I kept talking:

“Readers came to believe Lovecraft,” I said, “and imagined that every strange thing in his tales had taken place in my own university. Can you picture them making little Vine clips outside my office window, or students chasing each other about with fried squid-tentacles from the Italian café across the street?” I tried to make a light remark, but it fell utterly flat. They looked, still indifferent, but from the icy gaze, I felt a hint of discontent. 

“But of course,” I continued, striving to keep my tone academic, “none of those events ever truly happened. Lovecraft only wove them into his fiction — albeit drawing cleverly on the unusual manuscripts in our special collections. This evening we shall look at how he used the term ‘hieroglyph’ to suggest a sense of immense antiquity in his stories. And then we are going to see some examples from our special collection and to reveal the true scripts that inspired Lovecraft”.

Miraculously, that last sentence restored the peace in the room. But I could see that the audience was now fully engaged. I congratulated myself in silence and carried on:

“Lovecraft used the term ‘hieroglyph’ very early on in his career. The term was used in one of the first of his tales, Dagon. And then, it appeared in the well-known The Call of Cthulhu, or, if a more accurate pronunciation suggested by Lovecraft, Khlûl′-hloo… ”

Just as I was doing my best to pronounce that first guttural syllable — ‘Khlûl’ — to impress my audience, I heard a heavy thud behind the wooden panels. It was followed by a muffled, shuffling sound, as if something were lumbering along the wall. No one else seemed to react; the dozen faces remained fixed upon me, and I thought — absurdly — that they were simply charmed by my pronunciation.

“…in both stories, hieroglyphs were cut onto the big blocks of stone or monolith of the marine city, or R’lyeh. For those of you who haven’t read Lovecraft, this sunken, cyclopean city was the dwelling of Cthulhu, who will rise again when the stars were in right positions”. Rather untimely, those granite houses along the street of old Dunmarrow came to my mind.

“To create an impression that the city is so ancient that it predate the days of human beings, but at same time built by a sentinel group, Lovecraft covered this city with hieroglyphs. This is effective, as in popular culture, the great antiquity and mysterious atmosphere of ancient sites, such as an Egyptian tomb, was indicated by walls covered with hieroglyphs. The hieroglyph was ancient, yet civilised, looking completely different from alphabets that were connected to the modern western world”.

“Indeed, sometimes, the great antiquity of one space rests almost solely on the fact that its wall was covered with hieroglyphs in Lovecraft’s tales. For example, in The Shadow Out of Time, he said the structures eons old were ‘hieroglyphed’. And in the story, the only evidence for the presence of a modern mind, who has time travelled to those ancient times was the alphabetic writings Professor Peaslee found in the ruins. Here, two points in time were reduced into two scripts. In the early 20th century, the idea that the history of writing systems is an evolution from pictorial signs to alphabet held strong, and here we see the influence”.

I paused a bit and decided to insert again my sceptical prejudice towards Lovecraft: “But the presence of the said alphabetical writing was of course not true. The reports in Miskatonic University mentioned none of it, and Lovecraft made up the entire story to explain how this writing was lost during the expedition—clever, but let’s be aware of the boundary between the realities and stories”.

This remark clearly unsettled some of the older listeners. While they continued to stare at my slides with their indifferent yet haunting round eyes, some of them gently shook their heads in disapproval while one even let out a sigh. I got this reaction a lot in my career though and had grown used to this. One Lovecraft fan group in New York once even staged a small protest outside one of my lectures some years ago. This only hardened my belief that one must not lose his or her sanity and footing in reality, when facing convincing stories from Lovecraft—however convincing it is.

“And not only the popular culture could reduce the antiquity of a geographical space into a script, it happened in humanities as well,” I tried to pull the topic away from fantasy world to the history of social science, “Egyptology itself has long been criticised for this very kind of reduction. It began not as a study of Egypt’s ancient societies in all their aspects — that was left to archaeology and anthropology, but as the study of its writings. The discipline was, in a sense, defined by the hieroglyph”.

“And the part of history that concerns Egyptology was defined by the presence of scripts, and had nothing to do with Egyptians themselves. Thus, as venerable colleague Stephen Quirke from University College London has once commented, quote, in sum, the Egypt of Egyptology is not the geographical space of the nation-state, but an historical surface inscribed by Egyptian hieroglyphs, end of the quote. Interestingly, the ancient cities in Lovecraft’s world were also ‘a surface inscribed by unknown hieroglyph’. Perhaps the reduction I have talked about was so widely accepted by intellectuals and the public that, when Lovecraft did the same, it worked pretty well”.

I decided to catch a breath here, and had some brief moments to check the reaction among the audience. Still, pairs of bulging eyes, almost sleepless, gleaming in dim light, met my gaze in the midst of stale air. Have any of them blinked in this entire time?

III

I tried not to compare the oddly bulging eyes of my audience to those folks from Innsmouth, Massachusetts, vividly conjured by Lovecraft and continued: “Now, let’s move on to Lovecraft’s description of these hieroglyphs, particularly those covering the marine monuments from Dagon and The Call of Khlûl′-hloo…”

Another thud reached my ears from my back, but this time less muffled and followed by a very faint sigh that was somehow croaking, with liquid, bubbling intonation. It was hardly noticed by anyone in the audience and for a moment I believed it must be hallucination in my head.

“Lovecraft must have seen those unusual scripts from our library’s collection and those were the inspiration for his hieroglyph,” I cleared my throat, trying to shake off the haunting thuds in my head, and carried on, “but in his tales he deliberately omitted the exact appearance of the hieroglyphs and offered no transliteration or translation. In other words, he rendered them into an ethereal figurative scripts that remained undeciphered, and thus mysterious and ancient. The hieroglyphs here are voiceless; what matters is simply their presence in the reader’s mind’s eye”.

“This, I would say, goes against the narrative created by the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs in 1822. The decipherment was an achievement of the Age of Enlightenment, an age championing rationalism and scientific mindsets. And being deciphered means that Egyptian hieroglyphs were stripped of their visuality, the extra meanings convey through their figurative shape, and reduced to cold grammar and phonetic correlations…”

Rather unfortunately, I could see my audience lost their interest, with their gaze gradually becoming empty, sometimes sliding to elsewhere. But for sake of the depth of this lecture, I have to digress to this distant history of Egyptology.

“Lovecraft shunned away from the enlightened treatment of the hieroglyph. In some senses he revived the European fascination with Egyptian hieroglyphs, or any non-European scripts, from the Renaissance. Or we could say that he took a rather romantic view of hieroglyphs, which is itself an antithesis to rationalism. The best way to frame it is to think about Egyptian hieroglyphs in paintings of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema. In his works set in ancient Egypt, the hieroglyphs were visual cues, rousing an air of antiquity in silence, and no decipherment is ever needed”.

I glanced back at the projection screen. An Egyptian in a Doorway by Alma-Tadema glimmered there, its tones washed pale by the feeble, old-fashioned projector. The gaze of the figure on the painting, with that empty gaze, with its chill detachment and uncannily small pupils, sent a involuntary shiver along my spine…When I turned again to the hall I saw that same pallid light reflected in every bulging, glassy eye before me — as though the painted Egyptian, staring from his ancient threshold, now peered out of them all.

“But”, I restarted, paused a bit as I now felt the warmth fleeing from my hands, “Lovecraft did describe what these hieroglyphs look like in Dagon: quote, consisting for the most part of conventionalised aquatic symbols such as fishes, eels, octopi, crustaceans, molluscs, whales, and the like. Several characters obviously represented marine things which are unknown to the modern world, but whose decomposing forms I had observed on the ocean-risen plain, end of quote”.

“This is actually, for me, realistic and makes a lot of sense, if one look at the nature of hieroglyphic scripts used by, say, ancient Egyptian and Mayan. In Egyptian hieroglyphs we can recognise many kinds of mammals, birds and plants, with many of them being very common in the ancient Egyptians’ home, such as the hippopotamus, crocodile, ibis and reed plants. And in Mayan hieroglyphs, there are the Giant pocket gopher, parrot and turtle. Hieroglyphic systems usually show a very faithful depiction of things and thus an intimate affinity to their environment. Actually, the writing system itself is an encyclopaedia of its world and culture. It holds this culture together by binding material world with semantic meanings, while at same time, keeping itself alive by attaching itself to this very culture and world. So now,” I finally turned back to Lovecraft’s story, “we can see that the hieroglyphs from the underwater city also include many marine species, some of them already extinct. And if the city has been built by those fish-men who worship their Ancient Gods, and has been there for so many centuries, then it makes complete sense that their hieroglyphs include exclusively marine creatures—that is their…..”. All of sudden I started to scan my audience again—bulging eyes like goldfish, hairless and pale skin…“home”, I finished the sentence, but feeling slightly uneasy, as if I am seeing those fish-men right now. No, I told to myself, it is the fantasy of one man, don’t be crazy. Focus on the lecture, focus!

“Yet, it is still strange for a hieroglyphic system to contain only one category of things like marine animals. In ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, material culture, such as vessels, tools and buildings were common as well. So we must also consider other possibilities”, I tried to regain my focus, but only to feel ever colder hands, “that the hieroglyphs in Dagon were actually a very special inscription. It could be a sacred one skilfully composed with signs depicting marine animals only. And this involves the domain of the hieroglyph. In the real world, the hieroglyphs were mostly reserved for sacred texts and usually inscribed on durable monuments. The holy sites and stone surfaces are the usual domain of these scripts, just like the hieroglyphs in Lovecraft—they covered the walls and pillars of the city of the….well, R’lyeh”—I struggled not to provoke another mysterious thud behind me—what was I afraid of? 

“Its connection to gods usually permits writers to play some game of words. And in many cases, signs of the same kind were used skilfully in texts dedicated to certain god. Two Hymns to Khnum from the the Greco-Roman period at the Temple of Esna are two examples of such a jeu de mots. One inscribed on the  eastern corner of the Interior Eastern wall was written almost completely with the ram. Some wear different headgear or have different ritual paraphernalia, indicating different words. Since the god Khnum is usually depicted as a ram, it is very proper for a hymn to him to be completely written in rams. The other one is found on right side of the same wall, written completely with crocodiles. Could the text in Dagon be something similar, dedicated to the Old God?”

Just as I said this, a string of breathy whisper faltered into the thin, salted air of the old lecture room:

I was pretty sure it was there, from the back of the wood panel behind me, with that familiar bubbling intonation, as if someone or something was speaking from the dark water. As I looked up, I found the once disengaged audience now had an eerie, contrived smile stretched out of their stiffed visages that looked more learned than amused, as if they had heard a long-awaited truth rather than a lecturer’s speculation. The face of the Lord Provost, for the very first time, seemed to brighten slightly, and I thought I detected the faintest nod, his lips parting as if in awe.

IV

A mixture of unease, excitement and morbid curiosity—my usual vice—now was pumped by my beating heart to all the tips of my extremities, because I was now ready to show my greatest prize: those digitised, high-resolution images of the manuscripts from the darkest corners of Miskatonic University library. A surge of pride mingled with that already thrilling mix of emotions, when I saw those unnatural smile across audiences’ pale faces. “Now let’s move on to the actual scripts from our Special Collection that inspired Lovecraft”, I cleared my throat before saying it like a herald announcing the arrival of a prestigious guest. “Could these be the true forms of hieroglyphs in his stories? Could these be the inscriptions carved by fish-people millennia ago”? My propensity for showing off drove away all my fear, making me an academic Shaman in trance. My voice was getting louder, and my speech faster, and then I talked like a great showman: “Behold, these pages from the famous Necronomicon”.

As I clicked on my keyboard, eight pages of that sinister manuscript emerged on the old projecting screen. “This is the 17th century Latin version and you are all privileged to glance upon it—no other library, like the British Library and Bibliothèque Nationale, could exhibit their copies as I am doing now”. I knew those strange, nightmarish scripts that stand out from the Latin letters. I have pondered upon them for so many nights and still, they give me a shiver every time I look upon them. But all of these fears were now suppressed by my passion, and by the unusual reaction of my audience. Those once passive, drowsy town folks were now awakened—their bulging eyes reflected no chill glimmer, but a flame of curiosity and excitement; their thin and bluish lips now completely parted in awe. Everyone—including those indifferent young ones in hoodies—now raised their chin, looking at the screen as if looking at a rising star. Pale light of the projector bounced from the strange chain of the Lord Provost, who seemed to be so stirred by these strange scripts and about to jump from his seat.

Their odd excitement also emboldened me and for that moment I put down my doubts about their bulging eyes, unusual baldness and that creepy whisper from behind, and continued: “There are only a few examples of this script, and the Latin commentaries around it were also strange, as the spelling reflects the articulation of sounds not known among any language we know. The mysterious transliteration was followed by some equally obscure incantations or hymns…”

“Do you have it”?

The words cut across my sentence — a strong, deep voice with a faint, bubbling rasp in the h. I turned and saw the Lord Provost rise sharply from his seat, pushing the chair back with a harsh scraping sound. I was stunned by this question—completely direct and blunt: there was no raised hand, no “Excuse me” or “Sorry for the interruption”, no soft courtesy in tones—just plain, forceful, primitive interrogation.

“Yes,” I heard myself say.

At once I knew it was the wrong answer.

“Aye. Let us see it, then?”

“The what?” I knew, he was after the digitalised Necronomicon, and I knew that I cannot let him have the entire pdf file in my laptop—they are not for the private use outside the University, let alone the risk of it leaking to the public. I will lose my job if I did this. So I feinted my innocence, trying to buy time to fend him off gracefully.

“The book, lad, the book, the Necronomicon”. His voice was low but implacable, with the air of an old, commanding aristocrat.

I mustered my weak defence: “I’m afraid not, Sir. There is a policy from my University…” I sounded like a lowly bureaucrat and was immediately rebuffed:

“All words and words, lad — all your scholar’s pride and ignorance! Aren’t we the folk who are the true owners of this prize, aye”? He asked while turned halfway to the rest of the audiences, who were now all staring us with hollow bulging eyes. Few responses of different tones and styles could be heard across the room:

“And we are the people who know the true value and meanings of that, better than you! For we have seen the splendid image of the Great Old One and we are going to embrace them when the stars are in their right positions…aren’t we the ones who deserve this BOOK”?! His face started to twist in a beastly way, foam gathered at the corners of his thin lips. But the responses were more uncanny than his face:

All of them were now standing up, looking blankly, answering in the very same tone in a mechanic way.

“And aren’t we nyth’drnn ot c’uh’eog”? All of a sudden, the human words gave away to that unusual articulation of sounds, that strange yet familiar liquid, bubbling intonation.

Only in the darkest days of the most diabolical regime of dictatorship of human history can one hear such a collective response in such a uncanny homogeneity. All of them now all pushing out that hoarse voice unknown among humankind, with their withered lips opened, revealing one black hole after another on their pale, languishing visages. And in the foremost of this abominate cultist, the Lord Provost—or what ever he was—glided quietly towards me in his robe like a Beryozka dancer, reaching out his right hand towards me. Now, I could see it:  pale green, calloused, with fingers webbed.

“Now give it to me, lad”.

“No”. Despite my deepest fear, I gave no quarter, grabbing my laptop and tearing it from the projector. But unconsciously, I was pushed back slowly while he was advancing, only stopped by the wood panels behind the podium. I could hear my own heart beat, and see my own vision distorted by my pumping pulse of my head. And it was at this moment, I had a unwilling closer look of his ceremonial chain—its patterns were indeed familiar, for they are the very same one on those gold pieces displayed on that damn pedestal.

“G̸͚̯̋i̷̘͕̒v̸̜͗ĕ̸͖̝̚ ̸̠̎I̵͚͋t̸̽͜͠ ̸̇̅͜T̵̗̥̓͑o̸͉̝̿ ̷̺̼̒̂M̷̮͌ȇ̸̹̀!”

The patience had finally departed from him, and so was his humanity. His voice was coarse and throaty—I have heard this before, that whisper from the wall.

“Or shall our most senior brothers take it from you!” Now his gaze move to the wood panels right behind me, giving out a demonic command: “𝔄𝔦! 𝔖𝔥𝔲𝔟-𝔑𝔦𝔤𝔤𝔲𝔯𝔞𝔱𝔥!”

An unworldly roar burst from the back of the wall, like a disciplined chorus, just like my previous audience. And apart from that watery intonation and hoarse voice, from the gaps of panels, fishy reek escaped as I could feel the breath of many, with the smell of brine and old nets and the wet slap of something heavy against the panels.

This was followed by disordered beating and pushing on the panel—they were going to come out and snatch it from me! And there is no way out, as the “Lord Provost” and his entourage were shambling towards me, while the group of unknown beings sandwiched me from the rear. Looking into their bulging eyes, while being pushed by lumbering limbs of monsters, I came to a realisation that Lovecraft had been right. I reached the haunting epiphany that those manuscripts should indeed be sealed forever. Before, Wilbur Whateley had to travel all the way to Arkham for consulting that damned Necronomicon and even though he was stopped, look what he could do to our world? And now? If my digital copy of this fall to their hand, then there will be no travel needed, and no one can stop them—they will have the millennia-old grimoire on the tip of their webbed fingers and imagine what they can achieve with those abominable incantations? Oh humanity, forgive me for I have failed, for I have indeed opened Pandora’s fateful box.

Their distorted shadows loomed over me; the boards behind my back shuddered under the pounding from within. I could hold them off no longer. Then the panels behind me burst apart and—

…and broke off.

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A story for All Hallows’ Eve by Tian Tian.

Cover image: Generated by SORA of OpenAI 2025 Oct 7.

We are excited to announce our autumn termcard of hybrid seminars, with three events coming up. The topics include Anatolian Hieroglyphs, Linear A and B, Greek alphabetic education and European and Japanese heraldry. You can find the details, zoom registration link and poster below.

VIEWS Autumn Seminars 2025

Selected Wednesdays, 16.30-18.00 UK time

In person: Room 1.11, Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge (with tea from 16.15)

Remote: Zoom registration HERE

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8th October

Annick Payne: Anatolian Hieroglyphic masterclass

22nd October (Mycenaean seminar)

Pippa Steele: Sematography in Linear A and B and related problems

12th November (Double event)

– Daniel Anderson: Alphabet exercises and learning aids in ancient schoolrooms and their cultural impact

– Richard Sproat: The relevance of heraldry to writing systems

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All are welcome!

VIEWS MT 2025 seminarsDownload