Alpha Beta: How 26 Letters Shaped the Western World

In the tradition of the international bestseller The Universal History of Numbers, John Man has written a wonderfully engaging narrative that could be called the " universal history of letters." It illustrates how our alphabet came to be. How it was influenced by scribes as well as kings, cultures ancient and extant, politics, religion, even mythology. How so many adventures came to accompany its evolution. How truly unique a prize it is.Alpha Beta weaves its way from man’ s earliest scratches on bone to the first wedge-shaped marks in Mesopotamian clay, from the Pharaoh’ s hieroglyphics to the Torah’ s innovative characters, from Homer’ s epics to the lost culture of the Etruscans, all the way to the Internet explosion. What surfaces is an intriguing blend of characters, controversies, and stories, including that of a perplexing picture disk found on Crete, a robbery in the Egyptian desert, the invention of Cyrillic— — and even a continuing mystery surrounding