Inventing the alphabet : the origins of letters from antiquity to the present
Johanna Drucker (Author)
Though there are many books about the history of the alphabet, virtually none address how that history came to be. In this book, the author guides readers from antiquity to the twenty-first century to show how humans have shaped and reshaped their own understanding of this transformative writing tool. From ancient beliefs in the alphabet as a divine gift to growing awareness of its empirical origins through the study of scripts and inscriptions, the author describes the frameworks - classical, textual, biblical, graphical, antiquarian, archaeological, paleographic, and political - within which the alphabet's history has been and continues to be constructed. The book begins in ancient Greece, with the earliest writings on the alphabet's origins. The author then explores biblical sources on the topic and medieval preoccupations with the magical properties of individual letters. She later delves into the development of modern archaeological and paleographic tools, and she concludes with the role of alphabetic characters in the digital era. Throughout, she argues that, as a shared form of knowledge technology integrated into every aspect of our lives, the alphabet performs complex cultural, ideological, and technical functions, and her carefully curated selection of images demonstrates how closely the letters we use today still resemble their original appearance millennia ago. -- Provided by publisher
Print Book, English, 2022
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2022