A collection of free fonts by R. Kainhofer.
Download	Symbol accentuated	Sanskrit	Meroitic	Ugaritic	Oldpersian cuneiform

RK Ancient Fonts are a collection of TrueType fonts for MS Windows (Version 3.1 upwards):

Symbol Accentuated ()
RK Sanskrit ()
RK Meroitic (Hieroglyphics, Demotic and Transcript )
RK Ugaritic (Cuneiform and Transcript )
RK Persian Cuneiform ()

All the fonts are in the Windows TTF format, which has the advantage, that you don't need any special program to write these languages. You can use whatever windows-based text editor (WordPad, Write, MS Word, WordPerfect etc.) you like.

For further information about the language or the font, click on the appropriate language in the header of the page. There you will not only get some information about the script in general, but also see all the signs in the font.

Download:

The archive contains all the fonts together with a setup program for windows and sample files for all the fonts. You can download the fonts from the following mirrors:

Download RK Ancient fonts 1 for Windows (rkaf1.zip, 219 kB):

rkaf1.zip

Download RK Ancient fonts 1 for Macintosh ("RKFontsMac.sit, 190 kB):

RKFontsMac.sit
(This archive was created by a user, who downloaded the Windows version and converted it for the Mac. Note that this is not officially supported by me, so either you're lucky and it works for you, or you're not and I can't do anything about it. Since I don't have a Mac I couldn't even test this.)

If you find a glyph missing in any of the fonts above, so please tell me at fonts@kainhofer.com

Note: These fonts are free of charge!

A Setup-Program is included, which installs the files and the fonts in the Windows-System. Added to every font there are sample-files and a table of the assignment of the keys as Write or WinWord 2.0-documents (for view with Word, WordPad of Windows 95 or any other good word processor). The key-assignment is also included in the PCX-graphics format (in case you do not have any of the mentioned word processors) for view with Paintbrush of windows 3.1 or MS Paint of Windows 95. These files are installed in the corresponding subdirectory.

Symbol Accentuated:

As the default Symbol font provided by Microsoft does not contain any Greek letters with accents , I have designed a font to write Greek with accents.

The ancient Greek authors and poets of the best time did not use accents, which were introduced a few hundred years later to provide a better readability and more information about the pronunciation. Till now there were no fonts available to use such vowels with accents and spiritus, so that you had to use the ordinary vowel and draw the accent or the spiritus manually.

RK Sanskrit:

Sanskrit is the classical language of India, now only spoken by a few upperclasses. It belongs to the family of the Indo-European languages, where it is one of the oldest members. It must be remembered that Sanskrit is an ancient language, that for the past 3000 or more years it has been a vehicle of expression of Indian civilization and culture. As a spoken language, to be sure, it was in the course of time superseded by its many derivative speeches. As a literary language, however, Sanskrit never died out, but surprisingly is even nowadays written by a small number of cultivated Hindus, and books and articles are published in it. During its long history thousands of works were composed in Sanskrit, in the earliest times transmitted orally, but later committed to writing on birsch-bark or palm-leaves, eventually on paper after 1000 A.D.

The oldest literature that has come down to us in Sanskrit is known by the generic name 'Veda". Among the many famous works, there is the Bhagavad-Gita, which has become virtually the bible of modern Hinduism. [W.H. Maurer: The Sanskrit language, Curzon Press 1995]

RK Meroitic (Hieroglyphic & Demotic):

The inhabitants of the imperium of Meroe (on the ground of Ethiopia) were the first people to use an alphabetic script. The signs for this script they took from the Egyptians - the Hieroglyphics (they did not use all the many hundreds of Hieroglyphics, but selected just 23 of them). They used two different scripts: Hieroglyphics and Demotic (compare it with our scripts!!!)

NOTE: With this font you do not get a font to write the Egyptian Hieroglyphics, although they look similar (but there are much more Egyptian hieroglyphics).

RK Ugaritic:

When some Archeologists dug in the ruins of Ras Schamra in the north of Syria, they found the ruins of a palace with a huge archive of texts in Ugaritic script. The commercial center Ugarit is situated at the edge between western-eastern and northern-southern cultural trends. Of all the scripts of the Near East the cuneiform script was the most important and so it is no wonder, the Ugaritic script is also a cuneiform script. The cuneiform script - originally used as syllabic script - lost this syllabic character in the Ugaritic script, which is a mere alphabetic script, containing of 30 letters. The Ugaritic cuneiform is interesting, because they show that a cuneiform script suits all the requirements to serve as an alphabetic script.

RK Persian cuneiform:

The oldpersian Cuneiform - not to confuse with the Babylonian cuneiform - is a soon form of an alphabetic script (or rather a mixture between alphabetic and syllabic script).