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--
