World's Writing Systems

It's a nice list, but a bit more genealogy would improve it greatly.

Many of the oldest writing systems began as a loose collection of pictograms but became more abstract over time. Where to draw the line between different stages of their development is often an arbitrary decision, their continuity hidden by the sparseness of ancient records.

For example, all of the following scripts can be seen as different stages of, or variations within, the same writing system: Old Hanzi, Oracle Bone, Bronze, Han, and Seal. Some of them might even be seen as different "fonts" encoding more or less the same set of characters. Others such as the Khitan and Jurchen scripts were clearly influenced by the Chinese writing system. It's a big family of related scripts, and should be presented as such.

A similar lineage can be drawn across many middle-Eastern and near-Eastern scripts that influenced one other and the Latin alphabet.

Of course there's still a lot of disagreement about exactly which way the influences went, but if you paint the picture with a broad enough stroke, you should be able to accommodate most of the uncertainty.

As interesting as this website might be, this layout is awful. I am not able to scroll on the overlays and if my firefox window is too small I can't even see the links to wikipedia and sorts.

Plus I really dislike those slow animations and really can't stand them, but that's just preference I guess.

That's seriously neat. I never realized quite how many writing systems there are in the world, or were historically.

It's good presentation. With a bit of work, it could be an amazing first-impression tool for people interested in scripts or linguistics.

For a rather more readable site with much of the same information, there’s always http://www.omniglot.com/

I’ve been a huge fan of it for years.

I'm guessing the things like "25 c" might be dates (century maybe, but century 25 hasn't happened yet). I don't understand it.

I'd add Vinča symbols as one of the oldest scripts out there. Maybe for some it may be a stretch to count it a full script, but considering their time (and the fact that this list included Runic, which was used more like for isolated markings or ornaments and less like building pieces of written messages), i'd say it should get a pass.

This is half backed information. The present day Tamil script was modified by missionaries in the 19th century. That means the present day script is only 1-2 century old. It should be split in multiple scripts instead of just one.

I am surprised that Old Irish isn't featured. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_orthography.

Actually Brahmi is not just a writing system but a family of scripts.

All Indic writing systems today are decedents of Brahmi.

And I already found an error in it. The Kannada script has evidence of it existed at least since 400 AD, but the website shows it as 1500 AD (?).

Additionally, the Vedic scripts would be much much older than what is depicted - circa 7,000 BC