Binding: Paperback
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.
Title: The Greatest Invention A History Of The World In Nine Mysterious Scripts
Author(s): Ferrara Silvia
Publisher: Picador
Barcode: 9781250862990
Pages: 304 Pages
Language: English
Publication Date: 2/28/2023
Category: General Encyclopaedias