Alphabet Key To History Of Mankind

Author(s): David Diringer
Publisher: Hutchinsons Scientific and Technical Publications

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FOREWORD
BY SIR ELLIS MINNS, LITT,D., F.B.A.
If it is speech that marks man off from the beast, and the great discoveries of the use of tools, the use of fire, taming animals, tilling the ground, working metals are long strides in his progress, the invention of writing and its improvement into a practical system may fairly be taken as the step leading directly to full civilization.
It is true that one or two recent writers have cried down writing as the instrument by which cliques of priests and rulers enslaved the far more useful handworkers. But without writing these authors could not have brought this injustice to our attention, and it is no doubt by writing that they will set it straight.
Be this as it may, the history of writing makes an attractive story; I have felt the attraction ever since as a schoolboy I read Isaac Taylor's Alphabet, and for more than twenty years I have yearly lectured on the subject. It is difficult to exaggerate how much it has grown since his time, many new scripts have been discovered, to several of them the key had to be found, to a few it is still missing. Some ten years ago Dr. Diringer's great Italian work L'Alfabeto nella Storia della Civiltà, for me superseded all former sources. Now I welcome the same store of learning duly increased and recast in an English form.
The whole matter has a special interest as affording the best opportunity for studying the phenomena of diffusion and of independent invention and of the mixed process which has been called "idea diffusion," the stimulus to invention afforded by the knowledge that a problem has been solved, though its particular solution may not be known, or may not be acceptable. By its very nature writing keeps a record of its own development. Our author proves with a new completeness the astonishing fact that almost certainly every alphabetic writing of any importance derives from one source, and the obscure scripts were devised by men who were aware of the existence of perfected alphabets. This is a fascinating result; it is so rare in life that so sweeping a generalization is tenable.
Though he calls his book The Alphabet, our author deals first with non-alphabetic writings, the great systems of Egypt, Mesopotamia, China and Central America, and the various ideographic odds and ends.
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