If you've been following the Assassin's Creed series recently, you've probably noticed a mysterious language associated with the precursor civilization from which this website gets its name, the Isu. It isn't just gibberish: the Isu language is an actual language with its own grammar and vocabulary, originally created by a developer formerly with Ubisoft named Antoine Henry. Over the past few years, a number of people in the Assassin's Creed fan community have worked to understand the language, including myself (Eden), TOWCB's own ActualSpider-Man, bool0011 on Reddit, Tormis Narno and, most famously, the people over at Access the Animus. This article will serve as a kind of jumping off point for a series of articles examining the Isu language, starting with the fundamentals and including links to further topics.

Let's start with some context. If you're reading this article, you're probably aware that in the world of Assassin's Creed, humans did not create the first civilizations on Earth. An ancient, technologically advanced species called the Isu built cities that predate humanity and which lasted until an apocalyptic event wiped out their entire world around 75,000 BC (an event known in the real world as the Toba Catastrophe and supposedly caused by a supervolcano eruption). The Isu, though long gone, left behind many of their near-magical devices (referred to as Pieces of Eden) and lived on in myth as the inspiration for the deities of various religions, such as the Roman Minerva or the Norse Odin.

In the real world, many of the languages which originated in Europe and parts of Asia, such as English, German, Spanish, Russian, Farsi and Hindi, evolved from an ancient, lost language known as Proto-Indo-European. There are no surviving examples of Proto-Indo-European, but linguists have worked to reconstruct much of the language by studying and comparing the various languages descended from it. In the world of Assassin's Creed, Proto-Indo-European was itself a descendant of the language of the Isu. What this means in real-world terms is that Antoine Henry created the Isu language by looking at reconstructions of Proto-Indo-European and working backwards to build something that could've changed over time to become Proto-Indo-European.

For this reason, you might recognize some of the words in the Isu language. For instance, the Isu word for "mother" is the very similar machtér, and the Isu word for "hidden" is kḷto, which looks a lot like the English word "cult." In this series of articles, I'll include the connections I've identified between Isu and Proto-Indo-European (sometimes abbreviated as PIE). Note that not all linguists always agree on how Proto-Indo-European words should be reconstructed. For the purpose of my own analysis which you'll see in these articles, I've used the reconstructions on Wiktionary (like Wikipedia but a dictionary), which are very consistent with the known Isu lexicon.

While the Isu language can be transcribed into the Latin alphabet (the one you're reading right now), the Isu actually wrote in their own alphabet, which you can see here in both a capital and cursive script:

The script I'm referring to as capitals (by analogy with Roman square capitals) doesn't actually have anything to do with uppercase letters, but rather was used by the Isu to inscribe text in stone (or adamant) and can be found at the top and left in the image, whereas the cursive script was used to write manuscripts on soft surfaces such as paper. In fact, one such manuscript exists in the real world: the Voynich manuscript, which contains text in an unknown script and which has never been successfully translated. The Isu alphabet in the Assassin's Creed series is thus based on the letters that appear in the Voynich manuscript.

In these articles I will pretty much exclusively write Isu text in the Latin alphabet, for both ease of writing and ease of reading.

Look out for more articles in the series, coming October 2024!

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