Ancient Scripts

Entities Ancient Scripts

Unicode includes characters from many historic writing systems, allowing ancient inscriptions, manuscripts, and scholarly text to be represented in modern HTML documents. These scripts include Phoenician, Cuneiform, Old Italic, Runic, and many other writing systems.

Ancient script characters generally do not have named HTML character references. They can be represented with decimal or hexadecimal numeric character references or entered directly when the HTML document uses UTF-8. Some ancient scripts require a font with support for the appropriate Unicode characters before they can be displayed correctly.

Phoenician Characters

The Phoenician alphabet was an ancient writing system used around the Mediterranean. Its letters influenced several later alphabets. The following table shows representative Phoenician characters from the Unicode Phoenician block.

Cuneiform Characters

Cuneiform was used to write several languages of the ancient Near East. Unicode contains hundreds of Cuneiform signs, including characters used in Sumerian and Akkadian texts. The following table shows representative characters.

Old Italic Characters

The Old Italic Unicode block represents several ancient alphabets used on the Italian peninsula before and during the rise of the Roman alphabet. The following table shows representative Old Italic letters.

Runic Characters

Runic alphabets were used by Germanic peoples before and during the Middle Ages. Unicode includes characters representing several historical runic traditions. The following table shows representative runic letters.

Using Ancient Scripts in HTML

Ancient script characters can be entered directly in UTF-8 HTML or represented with numeric character references. Characters outside the Basic Multilingual Plane, such as Phoenician and Cuneiform characters, use Unicode code points greater than FFFF but can still be written with ordinary decimal or hexadecimal HTML character references.

<p>Phoenician: &#x10900;&#x10901;&#x10902;</p>
<p>Cuneiform: &#x12000;&#x12001;&#x12002;</p>
<p>Old Italic: &#x10300;&#x10301;&#x10302;</p>
<p>Runic: &#x16A0;&#x16A2;&#x16A6;</p>