The Greatest Invention
A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts
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3.4 • 5 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
In this exhilarating celebration of human ingenuity and perseverance—published all around the world—a trailblazing Italian scholar sifts through our cultural and social behavior in search of the origins of our greatest invention: writing.
The L where a tabletop meets the legs, the T between double doors, the D of an armchair’s oval backrest—all around us is an alphabet in things. But how did these shapes make it onto the page, never mind form complex structures such as this sentence? In The Greatest Invention, Silvia Ferrara takes a profound look at how—and how many times—human beings have managed to produce the miracle of written language, traveling back and forth in time and all across the globe to Mesopotamia, Crete, China, Egypt, Central America, Easter Island, and beyond.
With Ferrara as our guide, we examine the enigmas of undeciphered scripts, including famous cases like the Phaistos Disk and the Voynich Manuscript; we touch the knotted, colored strings of the Inca quipu; we study the turtle shells and ox scapulae that bear the earliest Chinese inscriptions; we watch in awe as Sequoyah single-handedly invents a script for the Cherokee language; and we venture to the cutting edge of decipherment, in which high-powered laser scanners bring tears to an engineer’s eye.
A code-cracking tour around the globe, The Greatest Invention chronicles a previously uncharted journey, one filled with past flashes of brilliance, present-day scientific research, and a faint, fleeting glimpse of writing’s future.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ferrara (Cypro-Minoan Inscriptions), professor of Aegean civilization at the University of Bologna, takes an entertaining and complex look at how written language has evolved. As she notes, readers may have "a vague, Proustian memory... from your days in elementary or middle school, something about Mesopotamia and how cuneiform was the first and only time writing was invented, the source from which all other scripts descended." In fact, she suggests, writing, which she calls the "greatest invention in the world," without which "we would be only voice, suspended in a continual present," was invented at least three other times, in China, Egypt, and Central America. Her sweeping survey covers quipu, a method of documentation using thousands of strings and knots used by the Incans to "govern an empire" for two centuries in the 15th and 16th centuries; inscriptions carved into the bottom parts of turtle shells in ancient China; and the invention of the tablet in Mesopotamia. Ferrara's survey is intricate and detailed, bolstered by photos and drawings of the various writing forms. The result is an intellectual feast that will enthrall admirers of Nicholas Basbanes's On Paper: The Everything of Its Two-Thousand-Year History.
