Scripts (writing systems) usually belong to specific languages and have temporal, spatial and cultural characteristics. The evolution of scripts has been the subject of research for a long time. This is probably because the long-term development of human thinking is reflected in the surviving script relics, many of which are still undeciphered today. The book presents the study of the script evolution with the mathematical tools of systematics, phylogenetics and bioinformatics. In the research described, the script is the evolutionary taxonomic unit (taxon), which is analogous to the concept of biological species. Among the methods of phylogenetics, phenetics classifies the investigated taxa on the basis of their morphological similarity, and does not primarily examine genealogical relationships. Due to the scarcity of morphological diversity of scripts’ features, random coincidences of evolution-independent features are much more common in scripts than in biological species, thus phenetic modelling based solely on morphological features can lead to erroneous results. For this reason, phenetic modeling has been extended with evolutionary considerations, thereby allowing the modelling uncertainties observed in the script evolution to be addressed due to the large number of random coincidences (homoplasies) characterizing each script. The book describes an extended phenetic method developed to investigate the script evolution. This data-driven approach helps to reduce the impact of the uncertainties inherent in the phenetic model due to the large number of homoplasies that occur during the evolution of scripts. The elaborated phenetic and evolutionary analyses were applied to the Rovash scripts used on the Eurasian Steppe (Grassland), including the Turkic Rovash (Turkic Runic/runiform) and the Székely-Hungarian Rovash. The evaluation of the extended phenetic model of the scripts, the various phenograms, the script spectra and the group spectra helped to reconstruct the main ancestors and evolutionary stages of the investigated scripts.

The Heritage of Scribes introduces the history and development of five members of the Rovash (pronounced “rove-ash”, other spelling: Rovas) script-family: the Proto-Rovash, the Early Steppean Rovash, the Carpathian Basin Rovash, the Steppean Rovash, and the Szekely-Hungarian Rovash. The historical and linguistic statements in the book are based on the published theories and statements of acknowledged scholars, historians, archaeologists, and linguists. The author provides detailed descriptions of the five Rovash scripts, presents their relationships, connections to other scripts, and explains the most significant rovash relics. Based on the discovered relations, the author introduces the systematic description of the rovash glyphs in the Rovash Atlas together with a comprehensive genealogy of each grapheme as well.

Persepolis and Jerusalem reconsiders Iranian influence upon Jewish apocalyptic, and offers grounds upon which such study may proceed. After describing the history of scholarship on the question of Iranian influence and on Jewish apocalyptic, Jason M. Silverman reformulates the methodology for understanding apocalyptic and influence. Two chapters set the discussion firmly in the Achaemenid Empire, describing the sources for Iranian religion, the issues involved in attempting a historical reconstruction, the methodology by which one can date the various texts and ideas, and the potential loci for Iranian-Judaean interaction. The historical context is expanded through media-contextualization, particularly Oral Theory, and critiques the standard text-centric method of current Biblical Scholarship. With this background, pericopes from Ezekiel, Daniel, and 1 Enoch are analyzed for Iranian influence. The study then brings together the contexts and analyses to argue for an 'Apocalyptic Hermeneutic' which relates the phenomena of apocalypticism, apocalypse, and millenarianism-seeing the hermeneutic as a dialectical thread holding them all together as well as apart- and posits this as the best place to understand Iranian influences.