LANGUAGE
First letters
Inventing the Alphabet: The Origins of Letters from Antiquity to the Present
by Johanna Drucker
University of Chicago Press, 384 pages, £32
At the heart of one of the world’s great storehouses of knowledge, the rooms built by Pope Sixtus V in the Vatican Library, are a series of pillars which literally prop up the library. Dating from the 1590s, the pillars are decorated with frescoes that celebrate “The Inventors of Alphabets” and depict mythical, biblical or historical figures as creators of alphabetic writing systems. The symbolism is clear: alphabets are critical to the development of western civilisation.
Johanna Drucker, a distinguished scholar at UCLA, provides a rich, detailed account of how western thinkers have understood the origins and development of the alphabet. Equally at home discussing medieval scholars, the learned divines of 17th-century England or archaeologists of more recent times, Drucker leads us through a complex series of intellectual approaches to a question that has perplexed scholars over centuries: where did the idea of the alphabet come from? The question represents more than just an interest in an arcane corner of knowledge. For many thinkers, especially in early modern Europe, alphabets were fundamental to the understanding of languages, and language was a critical issue in understanding the human mind. The founders of the Royal Society, for example, were deeply interested in such matters.
These debates have a contemporary resonance, as they assume a hierarchy of writing systems that can be traced back to ancient cultures in the near east and Europe. These alphabets continue to assert dominance across the globe, for example in modern computer technologies where character-based systems (such as Chinese) have been forced to adapt around them more slowly.
Millions learn the alphabet in childhood, and Drucker’s study opens up a fascinating realm of ideas and scholarship into its origins and meaning.
Richard Ovenden is Bodley’s Librarian at the University of Oxford
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