Alia Ancient Languages

Meet the Nabataeans of Petra and Hegra—traders whose scribes wrote an Aramaic dialect in a flowing, connected script. Over Late Antiquity, that Nabataean script evolved into the Arabic script, influencing letter shapes, cursive joining, and later dotting conventions. Key milestones include mixed Nabataean–Arabic inscriptions from the 4th–6th centuries across the Levant and northwestern Arabia. Important note: Arabic the language is not descended from Nabataean; it is the Arabic script that descends from the Nabataean script. This short breaks down the people, the writing, and the key dates that link Nabataean to the script used across the Arabic-speaking world today.

Meet ᚠ, Fehu—the Elder Futhark rune for the F sound. This short explains its meanings (cattle, movable wealth), names across traditions (Elder Futhark Fehu, Younger Futhark Fé, Anglo-Saxon Feoh), its role in inscriptions and transliteration, and how its value can shift toward /v/ in some contexts. Subscribe for more quick lessons on runes and early Germanic writing.

Discover Ge'ez, the ancient Semitic language of the Horn of Africa and the classical language of Ethiopia and Eritrea. Still used in the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Churches, Ge'ez preserves the only complete text of the Book of Enoch and anchors early Aksumite inscriptions and Bible translations. In this short video, see how the Ge'ez fidel (abugida) works, where the language came from, and why it still matters today. Subscribe for more quick dives into language history.

Explore the Runic alphabet of ancient northern Europe. In this short, we cover:

Explore Paleo-Hebrew—the early Hebrew script used in ancient Israel and Judah before the square Aramaic letters of later Hebrew. In under a minute, learn where it came from, how it was written, and how it differs from modern Hebrew.