A global exploration of the many writing systems that are on the verge of vanishing and the
stories and cultures they carry with them. If something is important we write it down. Yet
85% of the world's writing systems are on the verge of vanishing - not granted official status
not taught in schools discouraged and dismissed. When a culture is forced to abandon its
traditional script everything it has written for hundreds of years - sacred texts poems
personal correspondence legal documents the collective experience wisdom and identity of a
people - is lost. This Atlas is about those writing systems and the people who are trying to
save them. From the ancient holy alphabets of the Middle East now used only by tiny sects to
newly created African alphabets designed to keep cultural traditions alive in the twenty-first
century: from a Sudanese script based on the ownership marks traditionally branded into camels
to a secret system used in one corner of China exclusively by women to record the songs and
stories of their inner selves: this unique book profiles dozens of scripts and the cultures
they encapsulate offering glimpses of worlds unknown to us - and ways of saving them from
vanishing entirely.
