San Antonio College Library

Volume 15.

The author tells how three ancient languages- Egyptian Hieroglyphics, Babylonian Cuneiform, and Cretan Linear B. - came to be deciphered.

Shows the procedure followed in the decipherment of several important scripts and the interpretation of languages, presented in an intelligible manner. Also tells the stories of the men who deciphered them.

This book uncovers the long and significant impact handwriting has had on culture and humanity--from the first recorded handwriting on the clay tablets of the Sumerians some four thousand years ago and the invention of the alphabet as we know it, to the rising value of handwritten manuscripts today. "The future of handwriting is anything but certain. Its history, however, shows how much it has affected culture and civilization for millennia. In the...

From the simple representative shapes used to record transactions of goods and services in ancient Egypt to the sophisticated typographical resources available to twenty-first-century computer users, the story of writing is the story of human civilization itself. Calligraphy expert Ewan Clayton marks each step in the historical development of writing, and explores the social and cultural impact of every stage: the invention of the alphabet; the replacement...

"After a meteoric rise, China today is one of the world's most powerful nations. Just a century ago, it was a crumbling empire, with literacy reserved for the elite few. In Kingdom of Characters, Jing Tsu argues that China's greatest and most daunting challenge was a linguistic one. Just as important as China's technological and industrial advances and political maneuvers was the century-long fight to make the Chinese language--with its many dialects...