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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.
Introduction
1. When Did the Alphabet Become “Greek”?
2. Divine Gifts: Original Letters, Moses, and the Tablets at Mount Sinai
3. Medieval Copyists: Magical Letters, Mythic Scripts, and Exotic Alphabets
4. The Confusion of Tongues and Compendia of Scripts
5. Antiquity Explained: The Origin and Progress of Letters
6. The Rhetoric of Tables and the Harmony of Alphabets
7. Modern Archaeology: Putting the Evidence of the Alphabet in Place
8. Reading the Early Alphabet: Epigraphy and Paleography
9. Alphabet Effects and the Politics of Script
Coda: Alphabetic Agency and Global Hegemony
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
Description
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.
