ESCAFLOWNE WEEK

I’ve wanted to look into this deeper many times already so I’m glad that I finally managed, thanks to @escaflowneweek. Truth be told, I just wanted this post to just be about the conclusions to my part 1 research and scanning that one part of the artbook. I just wanted to be like, “oh hey, there is also this “Atlantean” script in the artbook but that one is handed to us on a plate, so I’m just giving it to you as is…”

Then I took a better look and I sighed, because this was turning out to be a longer post than I originally anticipated, again. Thinking that I originally wanted to do it all in one post is laughable now. Good news is, it’s not gonna be 15 pages of insanity like the last time, either. Without further ado, here’s the table as it appears in the artbook:

Origins and inspirations

First things first, I was wondering if they created this writing system from scratch or if there were some historical, or even ahistorical, references when creating the glyphs and letters. The short description in the book mentions (hiero)glyphs and it really makes you think of ancient civilizations and their writing systems. Considering the origins of those forms may have been pictures, it would have a lot in common with Egyptian hieroglyphs. To me, the most similar-looking system would be the Cretan hieroglyphs:

Perhaps with some hints of Phoenician (as we know, some of the names of these characters were used to create some of the Gaean names):

If we are speaking of the legendary Atlantis, obviously, no historical sources from there, but we actually have a few made-up alphabets to choose from. Funnily enough, I see most similarities in the Disney one:

It is created into a lot of detail, but it does not, actually, precede the Escaflowne one. Otherwise, there are quite a few similarities but I guess those could be explained by both sort of devolving the Latin alphabet to this fictional writing system.

As we know, Atlantis has been a popular myth for centuries and some treatises were published that I guess the creators must have familiarized themselves with to create the specific Escaflowne brand of the Atlantean myth (but that is maybe a topic for another time). Speaking of the (possible) Atlantean writing system, for example, the Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882) by Ignatius Donnelly makes a point of similarities between the ancient scripts that were being used on both sides of the Atlantic. The bridge being, presumably, the Atlantean civilization. But that just kind of returns us to the ancient Greek and Phoenician.

So I did not reach any conclusion about whether there were any existing things inspiring this made-up writing system or if the creators just used their imagination. Either way, I think they did a great job! Let me explain…

Atlantean and Gaean

When I started on this post, I roughly knew what the script looked like (I used it for a decoration in one of my pics) and I knew where to find it, but my memories were pretty vague. It took all that previous research of resources like Gaean characters’ journals and letters to actually see how deep this goes! 

The Atlantean symbols actually look kind of familiar. Similar enough to see what the creators intended… the Gaean writing system developed from Atlantean! Which is pretty awesome. And thanks to this neat table, I can even possibly uncover the last secrets left that I just could not figure out using the screenshots alone. Let’s post it here once more, with a translation this time:

So the way this is presented makes me think of Japanese, because of how it’s mostly syllables instead of singular characters (making it more of a syllabary, too). For those who don’t know, I refer to Japanese alphabets hiragana and katakana. The only singular letters you have in them are A, I, U, E, O, and N. Other individual symbols represent syllables like KA, KI, KU, KE, KO… SA, SHI, SU, SE, SO… etc. And they are usually organized according to that a-i-u-e-o order, which is also how they order things “alphabetically” in Japan. That’s why I said it is the equivalent of a-b-c-d-e when I spotted the string on the cover of Marlene’s diary. 

Anyway, back to this Atlantean script, so they represent it visually in the same way as one would hiragana or katakana, but some letters and whole rows are actually missing. We have the A, KA, GA, SA, ZA, TA, DA, NA, HA, PA, BA, MA, YA, RA, and WA rows, but miss the VA row (which is kinda strange given that it’s used in Varie’s – the only known character from that culture – name in katakana) and N. F is also kind of confusing, because in Japanese, you have the FU in the H row and from FU, you create FA, FE, etc. Atlantean probably doesn’t work like that, which means we are missing the entire F row. And Gaean doesn’t help because it seems P and F are used interchangeably there, which I realized while working on this (and it also reminded me of Korean). 

But for the N, you can actually help yourself and derive it from the N row:

If you compare it to the A row, it’s easy to see what is happening here:

So this is how you’d derive an Atlantean N:

And now flashback to the Gaean N (double here in Dryden’s signature):

Neat, huh? If you look at the other letters as well, I think it becomes obvious that you can find the remnants of Atlantean in Gaean language. 

What I still couldn’t seem to figure out was the B in the Gaean script. When I derived the Atlantean B though (like I just did with N), it kind of looked similar to Gaean V, as seen in the word “lover” and such. But the missing V row in Atlantean and a certain interchangeability of B and V in Japanese (Van/Baan being a prime example) told me that perhaps I should just combine the two. A similar thing is happening between C&K (their Gaean versions seem hard to differentiate) and P&F (which I already mentioned before).

Remember Gaean has those compounds as well? But they are not simply syllables and their use seems kind of irregular and depending on the writer. They can bind two consonants, not only a consonant and a vowel like Atlantean (at least according to the syllabary table). And yeah, since they write “English” they are not even necessary, you don’t need to combine them into some complicated shape, putting them one after another should work just as well. Nevertheless, this one thing convinced me they are remnants of the Atlantean script as well.

See how the whole column of U compounds in Atlantean fits the consonant inside the U-shaped enclosure? Well, the same thing is happening in Gaean. Some things are the same, some got simplified, perhaps some other influences stepped in, differences in handwriting, trends, localizations and such… which all formed “modern” Gaean that originally developed from the “ancient” Atlantean. That’s pretty believable if you ask me. 

It also tickles my imagination, thinking of how it must have been Atlanteans who brought written language to Gaean, and how they even found the human society on the planet they created. I think it’s pretty plausible they assumed the role of an “advanced civilization” who brought inventions and development with them, much like they are portrayed in some of the theories on Earth. As a civilization who (or whose remnants after the cataclysm) had shared their knowledge with civilizations such as Maya or Egypt and helped them to achieve those things we still are in awe about today. 

I already said that I much appreciate these extra miles that the creators went to deliver an organic fantasy world. And this really is one of the deepest lore things I’ve ever seen so far in any fantasy franchise. I’m pretty happy that the revealed Atlantean sort of helped me confirm some of my guesses from the previous post that I felt may have been a bit unfounded. And finally, I can uncover the mysteries of Gaea and of the Atlantean ruins and give you my current final best guess table as a final conclusion of these two posts: