Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in Ancient History
Episode: Johanna Drucker, "Inventing the Alphabet: The Origins of Letters from Antiquity to the Present" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
Description: Inventing the Alphabet: The Origins of Letters from Antiquity to the Present (University of Chicago Press, 2022) by Dr. Johanna Drucker provides the first account of two-and-a-half millennia of scholarship on the alphabet. Drawing on decades of research, Dr. Drucker dives into sometimes obscure and esoteric references, dispelling myths and identifying a pantheon of little-known scholars who contributed to our modern understanding of the alphabet, one of the most important inventions in human history.Beginning with Biblical tales and accounts from antiquity, Dr. Drucker traces the transmission of ancient Greek thinking about the alphabet’s origin and debates abo...