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.
Minutes
On March 21, 2025, Members of the Society and guests joined the speaker for a reception and dinner at 5:45 PM in the Members’ Dining Room at the Cosmos Club. Thereafter they joined other attendees in the Powell Auditorium for the lecture proceedings. In the Powell Auditorium of the Cosmos Club in Washington, D.C., President Larry Millstein called the lecture portion of the 2,512th meeting of the Society to order at 8:02 p.m. ET. He began by welcoming attendees, thanking sponsors for their support, announcing new members, and inviting guests to join the society. Scott Mathews then read the minutes of the previous meeting which included the lecture by Johanna Drucker, titled “Alphabet Histories: The Origins of Letters from Antiquity to the Present”. The minutes were approved, pending a minor correction.
President Millstein then introduced the speaker for the evening, David Bennett, of the Goddard Space Flight Center. His lecture was titled “Detecting Exoplanets by Gravitational Microlensing: Survey Gaps & Rogues”.
The speaker began by saying that although humans have been discussing the possibility of life on other planets since the time of the Ancient Greeks, the real story of exoplanets began in 1995 with the discovery of the first two planets outside our solar system. He then discussed the “habitable zone”; the range of orbital distances over which a planet is likely to have liquid water. Bennett discussed the physics of planet formation, claiming that the models were too complex for “first-principles” calculations and required a number of approximations and guesses. He said, “Exoplanet theory makes no grand predictions, and progress comes from observation.”
The speaker then discussed the methods for detecting exoplanets. These included: ground-based and space-based imaging, astrometry, Doppler radial velocity, transits, and gravitational microlensing. He showed an animation, depicting “reflex motion”; the change in position and velocity of a host star, due to an orbiting planet. He discussed how Doppler radial velocity and astrometry measurements could reveal this reflex motion. Bennett indicated that the majority of the first 500 exoplanets discovered were found by radial velocity measurements. He described the transit method, wherein the apparent brightness of the host star is reduced as the planet passes in front of the star, noting that the majority of recently discovered exoplanets were found using this method and the Kepler Space Telescope.
Bennett then discussed gravitational lensing: the prediction of Einstein’s theory of general relativity that light propagating in a gravitational field will appear to bend due to the curvature of space-time. He listed several of the seminal papers on the subject, including: Einstein’s 1936 paper on the “lens-like” action of a gravitational field, Paczynski’s 1986 paper on the search for dark matter, Mao & Paczynski’s 1991 paper on the search for planetary systems, Alcock’s 1993 paper on the observation of microlensing in the Large Magellanic Cloud, and the 1996 paper by the speaker and his late wife, Sun Hong Rhie, on the detection of Earth-sized planets by gravitational microlensing.
Bennett described the physics of planetary microlensing. As the lens star (or host star) transits in front of the source star, the gravitational field of the lens star causes the light from the source star to bend in such a way that the source star appears larger. This magnification, which is initially small, increases to a maximum value, and subsequently decreases as the lens star passes in front of the source star. This smooth increase and subsequent decrease in the apparent size of the source star can be interrupted by sharp spikes in the magnification if a planet is present. Additionally, this change in magnification generally causes an increase in the apparent brightness of the source star. It is these spikes in the magnification and brightness as a function of time that constitute the observation of an exoplanet by gravitational lensing.
The speaker indicated that the probability of finding a source star and lens star in the right position, as observed on the Earth, was quite small: on the order of a few parts in 106. He said that the Galactic Bulge, toward the center of the Milky Way, was the best place to look for planetary companions. He then discussed some of the results from recent microlensing surveys, including: MOA-II, which found 30 exoplanets between 2005 and 2012, and KMTNet survey, which found 63 exoplanets during its 6-year operation. He discussed how these results compare to various models of planet formation, or core accretion models. Bennett showed animations and hydrodynamic simulations of gas accretion during the early phases of planet formation.
The speaker ended his talk by describing the types of observations expected to be performed with the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, scheduled to be launched in 2026. The search for exoplanets is one of the primary objectives of this mission. This instrument will have significantly higher resolution and significantly faster survey times than current ground-based observatories.
The lecture was followed by a Question and Answer session.
A member asked if our current observational techniques would allow detection of “non-planetary” features around other stars; particularly asteroids or asteroid belts. Bennett responded that we have not been able to make such measurements with ground-based systems, and that there was some discussion as to whether the Roman Space Telescope would be capable of such observations.
A member noted that some researchers have claimed that the distribution of planets in our solar system is logarithmic, and is related to Boyle’s Law [sic] (actually known as Bode’s Law or more commonly Titius-Bode Law). He asked if such logarithmic distributions have been observed in other systems. Bennett responded that Boyle’s Law [sic] is “partly an accident”, saying that the law does not appear to be true in general, but that there may be planet formation mechanisms that make such a distribution more likely.
A guest on the live stream asked whether you could detect exoplanets using gravitational waves and could you use microlensing with gravity waves, as opposed to light. Bennett responded, “No”, saying that the gravitational fields of planets are quite small, and that current technologies are unable to detect gravity waves of such low amplitude.
After the question and answer period, President Millstein thanked the speaker and presented him with a PSW rosette, a signed copy of the announcement of his talk, and a signed copy of Volume 17 of the PSW Bulletin. He then announced speakers of up-coming lectures and made a number of housekeeping announcements. He adjourned the 2,512th meeting of the society at 9:57 pm ET.
Temperature in Washington, DC: 12.8° Celsius
Weather: Mostly Cloudy
Audience in the Powell auditorium: 44
Viewers on the live stream: 26
For a total of 70 viewers
Views of the video in the first two weeks: 419
Respectfully submitted, Scott Mathews: Recording Secretary