Ancient Web: Jack Kilmon Put Ancient Scripts on a 1997 Homepage

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Jack Kilmon's homepage calls him 'Your Scribe' and announces that its scroll is still being quilled. The metaphor is theatrical; the archives of old-looking letterforms are very real.

Visit Jack Kilmon's historical homepage

The site's visitor counter dates its tracking to October 8, 1997. Its design has remained unmistakably personal: a scribe illustration, topic links, font samples, mailing-list favorites, website awards, and an invitation to order reproductions of ancient texts written on papyrus or parchment.

Kilmon's interests spread across early Christianity and the wider ancient world. The homepage points to essays on New Testament history, Essenes and Nazarenes, early Christian literature, the coins circulating in Jesus' time, and questions about the Shroud of Turin. It does not pretend to be a neutral institutional encyclopedia; it is clearly one person's intellectual workshop.

Ancient writing meets the TrueType era

The most practical corner is the free font-download page. Kilmon says he drew the alphabets himself for teachers, students, and researchers who need something resembling original scribal or monumental forms instead of a modern transliteration.

The collection identifies scripts such as early Phoenician, the lettering of the Mesha Stele, Lachish ostraca, Elephantine papyrus cursive, Nabataean Aramaic, Samaritan, Roman Rustica, Carolingian minuscule, Gothic Textura, early Greek, and Etruscan.

That inventory is a snapshot of an old computing problem. An ordinary word processor could render Latin letters easily, but teaching manuscript history required specialized fonts and custom keyboard mappings. Kilmon even thanks a contributor for remapping some character sets for Macintosh users.

He is quite candid about their limitations. A font cannot recreate the individual gestures of a scribe; to approximate a manuscript hand, he tells readers to tweak spacing, size, vertical position, and emphasis character by character. Technology helps. Then you still have to do the scribing.

The site's historical arguments should be read as Kilmon's interpretations, not automatically as scholarly consensus. That distinction is particularly important for disputed religious-history material. The font catalogue, though, is an independently understandable artifact of a time when making educational typefaces and putting them on the Web was an act of personal generosity.

Examine the original scribal-font catalogue and Kilmon's historical index.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.