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 7, 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 2,511th meeting of the Society to order at 8:01 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 Robert Smith, titled “The James Webb Space Telescope: Key Moments in its History”. The minutes were approved as read.
President Millstein then introduced the speaker for the evening, Johanna Drucker, of the University of California Los Angeles. Her lecture was titled “Alphabet Histories: The Origins of Letters from Antiquity to the Present”.
The speaker began by saying that there was a single “tap root” for most modern alphabets, and that “…the original alphabet is Semitic, and it is proto-Canaanite, and it is from the ancient near-East.” She said that the creation of alphabetic writing constitutes an analysis of the key sounds of a language and the construction of symbols to represent those sounds. Drucker claimed that this process, which is distinctly different from cuneiform, hieroglyphics, and Chinese characters, began around 1700 to 1800 BCE. She described how the names of the letters, the sequence of the letters, and the sounds assigned to the letters allowed modern alphabets to be traced back to the source.
Drucker discussed the fact that older forms of writing, like hieroglyphics and cuneiform, had to be established before alphabetic writing could be developed. She said alphabetic writing required a cultural context in which writing had value, and this value was motivated by accounting and commerce. Drucker described the Wadi el-Hol inscriptions, discovered in 1993 on the banks of the Nile river, believed to be the oldest example of phonetic alphabetic writing discovered to date. She said that these inscriptions changed our understanding of the geographic range over which early alphabets were developed.
The speaker indicated that her area of interest was the historiography of the alphabet: the history of the study of the alphabet. Drucker said that she wanted to learn how knowledge about the alphabet was developed, was codified, and transmitted. She showed images of a text from 1667, wherein the author drew pictures of the anatomy of the human mouth and tongue pronouncing various sounds, and claiming that the organs of speech closely resembled the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Drucker then presented what she called “Knowledge Technologies in the Humanities”. These included: textual transmission, graphical copying, compendia assembling, graph & chart ordering, artifactual & historical curating, archaeological situating, epigraphic & paleographic reading, and forensic analyzing. She discussed and gave examples of each of these “Knowledge Technologies”.
Druker discussed the works of Herodotus, written in 440 BCE, claiming that this was the oldest written text describing the origins of the alphabet. She indicated that the text was transmitted without modification for more than 2,500 years. This text indicates that the letters of the Greek alphabet were actually imported by the Phoenicians, who brought the alphabet with them along various trade routes. She described how the alphabet, created further to the East, first spread to the Eastern Mediterranean Kingdoms (Phoenicia, Philistine, Israel, and Judah), and was then transported by land and sea, to Greece and Northern Africa. The speaker discussed the biblical accounts of the history of the alphabet, including the story of Moses and the Ten Commandments, and the Two Pillars of Seth.
The speaker then discussed “exotic alphabets”, which have been accurately copied and reproduced, but are not known to have been used. These included “celestial alphabets”, incorporating constellations and astrological signs. She presented several charts and graphs, produce during the 15th and 16th centuries, showing the relationship between characters in various ancient alphabets, and demonstrating the way in which specific characters were modified over time. Drucker discussed ancient coins, many of which have readable text, which serve as important artifacts in the study of alphabets, due to their robust nature and longevity. She showed images of the sarcophagus of Eshmunazar II, discovered in 1855, created in the 6th century BCE, with a detailed inscription written in the Phoenician alphabet. She claimed that this discovery was of great importance because Eshmunazar II was mentioned in the bible, as well as several other texts, such that the translation of the inscription was unambiguous.
And finally, Drucker discussed forensic studies of the alphabet, including a variety of modern analytic technologies and image processing techniques that allow scholars to read and decipher text that would otherwise be unreadable. She showed images of several artifacts, including pieces of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were rendered legible by such technologies.
The speaker ended her talk by saying that knowledge should not appear to be independent of the techniques by which it is produced and transmitted.
The lecture was followed by a Question and Answer session.
A member asked if a historical Moses actually existed, would not he only be able to read Egyptian Hieroglyphics? Drucker responded “That’s not what the bible suggests.” She said that the biblical story claims that Moses came down from the mountain with both the tablets and the ability to read them.
A guest asked about the Armenian alphabet, particularly with respect to other phonetic alphabets. Drucker responded that the Armenian alphabet represented a “deliberate intervention”, wherein an individual dictated specific changes to the symbols, but that Armenian was nonetheless a phonetic alphabet.
A guest on the live stream asked what progress had been made in deciphering “linear-A” from Crete. Drucker claimed that as far as she is aware, “linear-A” has not been deciphered. She indicated that she found this to be surprising, given the level of sophistication of current cryptography and artificial intelligence.
After the question and answer period, President Millstein thanked the speaker and presented her with a PSW rosette, a signed copy of the announcement of her 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 2,511th meeting of the society at 10:00 pm ET.
Temperature in Washington, DC: 10° Celsius
Weather: Cloudy
Audience in the Powell auditorium: 90
Viewers on the live stream: 38
For a total of 128 viewers
Views of the video in the first two weeks: 533
Respectfully submitted, Scott Mathews: Recording Secretary