The Story of Writing
Edition: New Ed edition
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Published: September 1, 1999
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 224
ISBN-13: 9780500281567
Subjects: Palaeography (history of writing); Linguistics; Historical Linguistics; Paleography; Language Arts / Linguistics / Literacy; History: World; Writing; Literacy; Ancient - General; Alphabet; History
First sentence: Writing is among the greatest inventions in human history, perhaps the greatest invention, since it made history possible.
Description: Writing is perhaps humanity's greatest invention. Without it there would be no history and no civilization as we know it. The Story of Writing is the first book to demystify writing for the general reader. In a succinct and absorbing text, Andrew Robinson explains the interconnection between sound, symbol and script, and goes on to discuss each of the major writing systems in turn, from cuneiform and Egyptian and Mayan hieroglyphs to alphabets and the scripts of China and Japan today. He explores "proto-writing," including Ice Age symbols, tallies and Amerindian pictograms, and surveys the astonishing multiplicity of alphabets - not only Greek, Roman, Hebrew, Arabic and Indian scripts, but also the Cherokee "alphabet" and the writing of runes.

Full coverage is given to the story of decipherment, and how the words of past ages have been brought back to life through the efforts of Champollion, Ventris and others. And in a provocative chapter devoted to as yet undeciphered scripts, Andrew Robinson challenges the reader: can the code of the Indus script, Cretan Linear A, the Phaistos Disc or Easter Island ever be broken? Armchair decipherers who read this book will be well placed to make discoveries that herald the next breakthrough.