Alpha Beta: How 26 Letters Shaped the Western World

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 missing head of British archeologist William Flinders Petrie. We are ever reminded of the alphabet’ s power. The Romans used it to display their strength, the Greeks to capture their myths, the Israelites to define their god.

Ultimately, Alpha Beta offers an extraordinary rediscovery of the alphabet’ s vital contribution to our sense of identity. For while the Western world of today is divided by languages, it remains largely united by the alphabet. And, as Man makes clear, from pre-alphabetic systems to the recording of human speech, from the oral traditions of our ancestors to the literacy of our children, the deceptive simplicity of " ABC" holds within it a rich,potent, and passionate history.