Thoth's Pill - an Animated History of Writing

NativLang · 1.3M views · 2015-11-06 · 47:25

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Overview

NativLang's 47-minute animated documentary traces the birth and evolution of writing, from early cave marks to modern scripts. It presents the history of the world's writing systems as a story.

On Hacker News

HN recommends it as a fun, amazing overview of writing systems whenever the alphabet or cuneiform comes up.

Recommended by 3 HN people across 3 months · HN mentions 2019–2023

Topics

Language & linguistics Graphic design & typography

What people said

MrsPeaches · 2021-01 · Strong recommendation
Highly recommend Thoth’s Pill [1] for a fun video on the subject. Goes deep but keeps it relatively light. Has the added bonus of going into Mesoamerican writing systems which are often underrepresented in these analyses. [1] [VIDEO]
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HocusLocus · 2019-12 · Strong recommendation
I also recommend Thoth's Pill, an amazing historical overview of writing systems that breaks new ground in animated video production... as they are describing alphabet systems and letter figures they are drawn in real time and presented on a clear crisp background. Where most documentaries we've seen over the years show glimpses of photographs of ancient writing samples, often dimly lit or weathered and faded, tending to make it more about documents than language -- these folk are writing script and glyphs on computer, presenting detailed traces or brushing the characters and building alphabets, explaining down to the character/sound. For children this is precious. If I had seen something like this when I was young, it would have sucked me in and maybe changed the course of my life. [VIDEO]
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29athrowaway · 2023-03 · Recommendation
If you like these topics, you will enjoy "Thoth's pill - an Animated history of writing" [VIDEO]
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Sources

Video by NativLang, played through YouTube.

HN Library · Source license

Data and selection notes

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HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

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