Inventing the Alphabet : The Origins of Letters From Antiquity to the Present

"Though there are many books about the history of the alphabet, virtually none address how that history came to be. In Inventing the Alphabet, Johanna Drucker guides readers from antiquity to the present 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, Drucker 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. Drucker's book begins in ancient Greece, with the earliest writings on the alphabet's origins. She 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 The first comprehensive intellectual history of alphabet studies . Inventing the Alphabet provides the first account of two-and-a-half millennia of scholarship on the alphabet. Drawing on decades of research, Johanna Drucker dives into sometimes obscure and esoteric references, dispelling myths and identifying a pantheon of little-known scholars who contributed to our modern understandings of the alphabet, one of the most important inventions in human history. Beginning with Biblical tales and accounts from antiquity, Drucker traces the transmission of ancient Greek thinking about the alphabet’s origin and debates about how Moses learned to read. The book moves through the centuries, finishing with contemporary concepts of the letters in alpha-numeric code used for global communication systems. Along the way, we learn about magical and angelic alphabets, antique inscriptions on coins and artifacts, and the comparative tables of scripts that continue through the development of modern fields of archaeology and paleography. This is the first book to chronicle the story of the intellectual history through which the alphabet has been “invented” as an object of scholarship. Contents Introduction One. When Did the Alphabet Become “Greek”? Two. Divine Gifts: Original Letters, Moses, and the Tablets at Mount Sinai Three. Medieval Copyists: Magical Letters, Mythic Scripts, and Exotic Alphabets Four. The Confusion of Tongues and Compendia of Scripts Five. Antiquity Explained: The Origin and Progress of Letters Six. The Rhetoric of Tables and the Harmony of Alphabets Seven. Modern Archaeology: Putting the Evidence of the Alphabet in Place Eight. Reading the Early Alphabet: Epigraphy and Paleography Nine. Alphabet Effects and the Politics of Script Coda. Alphabetic Agency and Global Hegemony Notes Selected Bibliography Index