Unicode support for ancient (and exotic modern) writing systems

It is a really nice and cool feature that Unicode supports a multitude of writing systems besides the really widely used ones today. What caught my interest in particular are historic writing systems for which there is now support. Some of them - which I find particularly memorable - include:

- Mesopotamian Cuneiform, the world's first and oldest writing system (used originally for writing Sumerian, later for Akkadian and about half a dozen other languages that used to be spoken in the Near East).

- Egyptian hieroglyphs (the second-oldest writing system). The Unicode order closely follows a rigid classification system that was invented by an Egyptologist, Alan Gardiner, in the 1950s. I'm personally quite fond of the ancient egyptian hieroglyph for cat (E13).

- Linear B, a syllabary used in Bronze Age Greece.

- Ugaritic, a derivative of the cuneiform, the world's oldest alphabet, used for writing the language of the ancient city state of Ugarit.

- the Old Persian script, another derivative of the cuniform script, used in ancient Persian.

- the Old South Arabian alphabet, used in ancient Yemen, and ancestor to the modern Ethiopian (Ge'ez) writing system.

- the Phoenician alphabet, the original alphabet from which most writing systems used today in the world (with the notable exception of Chinese and its derivatives - the Japanese Kana scripts) are descended.

- the Old Italic (or Etruscan) alphabet, used mainly to write the Etruscan language in ancient Italy. Its noteworthy because it was the ancestor to both our modern Latin alphabet, and to the Runic alphabet (see below).

- the Runic alphabet (or just Runes), used by the Germanic peoples in Central and northern Europe, and which was continued in Scandinavia to be used into the Middle Ages.

- the Ogham alphabet, invented in ancient Ireland, based around strokes that would be carved onto a rock, perhaps originally as some kind of secret code.

Unusual writing systems used today include:

- The Cherokee script, a syllabary invented in the 19th century by the Cherokee Sequoyah. Its hilarious because many letters have similar shape to Latin (or sometimes Greek) letters, but completely different values.

- Tifinagh, used to write the Berber languages in northwestern Africa.

There's a lot more there, but I find the way this is applied quite amazing.

Unicode does support an extremely wide range of characters!

That reminds me that this site and other sites on which I've worked should have UTF-8 encoding of character sets enforced (this should be fairly easy to do) since it is the standard these days. Running a site through the W3C validator will give notices if the character set is not UTF-8.

Some Japanese web sites I had developed used the character set Shift-JIS. This was before UTF-8 was in widespread use.

EDIT: Oh, I should add that there are private, unofficial uses including Klingon for Unicode!

Indeed, there is also the private use area. There is more than enough space in there for handling fictional writing systems (e.g. Klingon, or for example Tengwar).