Inventing the Alphabet: The Origins of Letters from Antiquity to the Present eBook

$25.00

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.

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About this eTextbook

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.

Publication details

Author: Johanna Drucker
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
eText ISBN: 9780226815800, 0226815803
Print ISBN: 9780226815817, 0226815811

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A licensed digital edition of this title, supplied as PDF or EPUB. The format is set by the publisher, so email us the ISBN before ordering and we will confirm which one it is.
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About this eTextbook

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.

Publication details

Author: Johanna Drucker
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
eText ISBN: 9780226815800, 0226815803
Print ISBN: 9780226815817, 0226815811

What you receive

A licensed digital edition of this title, supplied as PDF or EPUB. The format is set by the publisher, so email us the ISBN before ordering and we will confirm which one it is.
Delivered to the email address on your order as a secure download link, usually within minutes and always within 24 hours of payment.
Download links do not expire and there is no cap on re-downloads. Readable on any computer, tablet or phone, online or offline.
This is a digital edition. Nothing is printed, packed or posted, and there is no delivery charge.