Anyone who has studied the times2 guide today to hieroglyphics will know that the words on the left are bidding a cheery “good morning”. Don’t they look wonderful? Haven’t they a certain beauty and gravitas? The people of the Nile 5,000 years ago were good at embalming, bathing in ass’s milk and carving alabaster, but they really excelled at inventing an elegant script. The style is as fascinating as the substance, and as evocative of Ancient Egyptian life, with pictograms of eagle, rivers and other images that preoccupied that civilisation. Who knows what “good morning” would look like if our icons made their way into our script as pictograms? Perhaps the familiar two rectangles and two circles of the iPod would be put to good use, or in 1,000 years scholars might puzzle over a linear symbol, little realising that it derived from the plans for the yet unfinished Crossrail project in London.

From Islamic calligraphy to illuminated Bibles, people have delighted in the fact that a beautiful script celebrates as well as communicates. It would be easy to lament that, as text is now often mass-produced and virtual, such skill and style have gone; but they have just metamorphosed. This year, the Helvetica font celebrated its 50th birthday with tributes from devotees, who say that it is graceful, simple and has enhanced everything from posters for the film Trainspotting to advertising for Gap. Our modern scribes may not paint on papyrus but a script of beauty will wiggle its way to the future, its form having outlived its content.