There is a common assumption that sealing a letter was about privacy, and it misses what the object was for.
A seal provides no privacy whatsoever. Anybody determined to read…
There is a difference between two ways of putting a mark on a surface, and almost everything about the history of writing materials follows from it.
The first is to…
The number of signs a writing system requires is not a technical detail. It determines who can be literate.
A system with several thousand signs can be learned, and learning…
Scripts are usually classified by what a single character represents: a sound, a syllable, a consonant, or a whole word. Almost every design choice below follows from that decision. Here…
Source: Wikipedia
Writing a letter was a physical process with a dozen small stages, and every one of them is remembered by people who did it often. Here are seventeen.
1.…