Alphabet Histories
The Origins of Letters from Antiquity to the Present
Johanna Drucker
Distinguished Research Professor
UCLA
Sponsored by PSW Science Members Erica & Bruce Kane
About the Lecture
The history of alphabetic writing from its origin to its modification and spread is now more or less well-mapped. And though many common misunderstandings about the identity and diversity of alphabetic script remain, paleographers, epigraphers, and archaeologists have established a solid foundation for historical knowledge of when, where, and by whom the alphabet was invented. Occasionally new discoveries, such as the incised clay objects recently unearthed in Syria, or the Wadi el-Hol inscriptions discovered in the 1990s, challenge older narratives. But though the development of the alphabet is sufficiently established, a systematic account of the historiography through which we came to know that history was not mapped comprehensively until the research on which this talk is based.
First briefly sketching the origin of the alphabet, this talk traces various intellectual lineages from antiquity to the present, some now set aside, others still continuing, with an emphasis on technologies of knowledge production over several millennia. Attention to the materiality of information sources is an integral part of history of science and technology studies, but it has been less fully attended to in scholarship in the humanities. Using a constructivist approach to knowledge (based on the principle that what we know is a product of how we can know), this talk examines the material properties of textual, biblical, graphical, tabular, artefactual, archaeological, epigraphical and digital/forensic approaches to the evidence on which alphabet history is produced. The talk suggests that each phase of alphabet historiography be examined for its validity on its own terms, as a full explanation of the origins and development of script, even as the understanding of time scales and cultural processes of knowledge transmission have been through multiple paradigm shifts. Reflections on how the alphabet is conceived and understood have included mystical, magical, linguistic, pragmatic, and semiotic dimensions all of which continue to have some advocates into the present. The potency of letters is one of the touchstones of human history, not only in the empirical frame of an established record, but in the cultural imaginary where it is sustained. Long traditions fuel these beliefs and attention to their tenets provides an insight into the way knowledge attains legitimacy and asserts authority through various critical perspectives using different sources and types of evidence.
The global hegemony of the alphabet is apparent in its use in the internationally networked communication systems. All alphabets in use today—Roman, Hebrew, Arabic, Cyrillic, those in the Indian sub-continent—derive from a single source, the proto-Canaanite script developed in the Ancient Near East in the 2nd millennium BCE by Semitic speakers. Their accomplishment was not the invention of writing—that already existed in cuneiform and hieroglyphic systems throughout the region—but the analysis of spoken language into significant sounds that could be represented by a limited set of signs. Astonishingly, those signs, adopted for a multitude of languages, graphically modified, are what undergird our contemporary global communications and information transmission. The implications of alphabetic hegemony are linked to the history of its origin and development, and the larger issues in characterization of the Semitic roots and territories are evident in current regional and global politics.
Selected Media and References:
Johanna Drucker, Inventing the Alphabet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022).
Johanna Drucker, The Alphabetic Labyrinth: The letters in history and imagination (London and New York City: Thames and Hudson, 1994).
Johanna Drucker, “Inventing the Alphabet,” NewBooks Podcast; 17 August 2022. https://podtail.com/en/podcast/new-books-in-language/johanna-drucker-inventing-the-alphabet-the-origins/
Joseph Naveh, The Early History of the Alphabet (Magnes Press, 1987).
Andrew Robinson, The Story of Writing (London and New York City: Thames and Hudson, 2007).
About the Speaker
Johanna Drucker is Distinguished Professor and Breslauer Professor Emerita, Department of Information Studies, UCLA. Prior faculty positions included the Robertson Chair in Media Studies, University of Virginia; Professor of Art History, SUNY Purchase; Associate Professor of Art History, Yale University, Assistant Professor of Art History, Columbia University; Assistant Professor of Arts and Humanities, University of Texas at Dallas.
Drucker is internationally known for her work in the history of graphic design, typography, experimental poetry, fine art, and digital humanities. Recent work includes Visualization and Interpretation (MIT Press, 2020), and Iliazd: Meta-Biography of a Modernist (Johns Hopkins University Press 2020), Digital Humanities 101: An introduction to Digital Methods (Routledge, 2021). Her most recent publication, Inventing the Alphabet (University of Chicago Press, 2022), documents the intellectual history of knowledge about the invention and spread of the alphabet. Her work has been translated into Korean, Catalan, Chinese, Spanish, French, Hungarian, Danish and Portuguese.
She received her BFA from California College of Arts and Crafts in 1973; MA in Visual Studies from University of California, Berkeley, in 1982, and her PhD in Écriture: the history and theory of the visual representation of writing from UC Berkeley in 1986. Her dissertation focused on “Experimental Typography in Modern Art Practice: 1909-1923” and was later published as The Visible Word (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
Drucker’s artist’s books are widely represented in museum and library collections and were the subject of a travelling retrospective, Druckworks: 40 years of books and projects, in 2012-2014. The Century of Artists’ Books, published by Granary Books in 1994, remains a definitive and classic text in the field. Other recent work includes Diagrammatic Writing (Onomatopée, 2014), The General Theory of Social Relativity, (The Elephants, 2018), and Downdrift: An Eco-fiction (Three Rooms Press, 2018). Her solo exhibit of artworks, Graphic Animism, was held in Los Angeles at the Himalaya Club early in 2025.
In 2014 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, serves on the Academy Council, and is the Chair of the Humanities, Arts, and Culture Advisory Committee for the Academy. In 2023 she was elected to the American Philosophical Society, inducted in 2024. In 2021 she received the AIGA’s Steven Heller Award for Cultural Criticism. She has been the recipient of Mellon (1988-89), Getty (1994-95), and Fulbright (1984-85) Fellowships and was the inaugural Distinguished Humanities Fellow at Yale’s Beinecke Library in Spring 2019. She is currently working on ChronoVis, a platform for humanistic time modeling, as well as various other creative and critical projects. Her book, Affluvia: The toxic off-gassing of affluent culture is forthcoming from The Bridge publishers in May 2025.