Linguistic Discoveries

Conny Waters – AncientPages.com – With support from Kent manuscript expert Dr David Rundle, seventeen medieval manuscript fragments have been identified in Guernsey. These discoveries provide rare insight into the island’s literary and intellectual life during a period with little surviving evidence. Credit: University of Kent These medieval fragments were hidden in plain sight, having […]

Conny Waters – AncientPages.com – A Roman law expert from the University of Cincinnati has edited and translated a Latin legal text that was pieced together from fragments buried in the Egyptian sands for more than 1,600 years. The text deals with taxes. Left: Possible head portrait of Constantius II found in modern al-Bab, Syria (Penn

Jan Bartek – AncientPages.com – If you have a cat and enjoy reading, you may have noticed that cats often sit on books. This behavior appears to date back to the earliest days of books. Cats frequently keep us company while we read, write, and do many other activities. Scientists say cat paw prints have been

Jan Bartek – AncientPages.com – Today, people use about 7,500 languages to communicate. However, this number only captures a moment in a long and changing history. How many languages were spoken before people started keeping written records? Did the rise of farming reduce language diversity by letting larger farming groups replace smaller hunter-gatherer communities? Or

Jan Bartek – AncientPages.com –  Experts have uncovered information concealed for two centuries in a navigational chart created for 18th-century seafarers navigating the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. The beautiful paper scroll demonstrates that seafaring communities in the region developed an effective navigation system that supported trade among India, Arabia, and the Horn of