Sacred scripts

Before becoming an everyday tool, writing was almost everywhere a sacred matter. The Egyptians called hieroglyphs the «words of the god», the Mesopotamians read in the stars a «writing of heaven», and Jewish sages imagined a world created with twenty-two letters. This section traces the history of the great religious scripts and of the meaning given to their signs: from the Rosetta Stone and Champollion's decipherment to Horapollo's Hieroglyphica, which fascinated the Renaissance, and from cuneiform to the alphabet born in the mines of Sinai and spread by the Phoenicians. We then meet the Hebrew alphabet and the mysticism of letters, Greek and isopsephy, Devanagari and the syllable Om, Arabic calligraphy and the isolated letters of the Quran. The journey is completed by the scripts created to translate the Bible, such as the Armenian of Mesrop Mashtots, the Glagolitic of Cyril and Methodius and the Gothic of Wulfila, together with Chinese characters, Tibetan and Maya glyphs. Each article carefully separates documented facts from legends.