"Abbreviations for references": pages vii-viii.

Building upon his earlier works in which he proved a racial link between the Indo-Europeans in Europe and ancient Sumeria, in this work the author shows that the modern alphabet used in Europe (and thus most of the world) originated with a Proto-Indo-Hittite script which developed into Sumerian. This was then in turn transmitted to surrounding civilizations and ultimately became the written language of Western civilization. "The origin of our Alphabet and Alphabetic Writing-one of the greatest and most useful of human inventions-has long been the subject of countless conjectures, but has hitherto remained wholly unsolved. The new evidence now discloses by concrete proofs that unknown origin, the meaning of the letters or signs, the objects that they represent with their original names and meanings, and their racial authorship, which is found to be not Semite, as hitherto supposed, but Aryan. "The inventor of the alphabet is traced to the leading mercantile and seafaring branch of the ruling Aryans or Sumerians, namely, the Hitto-Phoenicians; and his personality appears to found in King Cadmus, the Phoenician sea-emperor of about 1200 BC, after whom the Greeks named their early alphabetic letters. "The effect, therefore, of these constructive discoveries is destructive of the current established theories of modern historians and philologists on the racial origin of the Higher Civilization and of civilized writing, both hieroglyphic and alphabetic. It thus necessitates a new re-orientation of the facts of Ancient History and of the History of our Modern Civilization."-From the conclusion. About the author: Lieutenant Colonel Laurence Austine Waddell (1854-1938) was a Professor of Tibetan, Professor of Chemistry and Pathology, a British army surgeon, and an explorer who travelled widely in India, Nepal and Tibet. He was also a philologist and linguist and one of only a few scholars able to fully translate Sumerian and Sanskrit-a skill for which he won great renown.

"Abbreviations for references": pages vii-viii.

"Though there are many books about the history of the alphabet, virtually none address how that history came to be. In Inventing the Alphabet, Johanna Drucker guides readers from antiquity to the present to show how humans have shaped and reshaped their own understanding of this transformative writing tool. From ancient beliefs in the alphabet as a divine gift to growing awareness of its empirical origins through the study of scripts and inscriptions, Drucker describes the frameworks-classical, textual, biblical, graphical, antiquarian, archaeological, paleographic, and political-within which the alphabet's history has been and continues to be constructed. Drucker's book begins in ancient Greece, with the earliest writings on the alphabet's origins. She then explores biblical sources on the topic and medieval preoccupations with the magical properties of individual letters. She later delves into the development of modern archaeological and paleographic tools, and she concludes with the role of alphabetic characters in the digital era. Throughout, she argues that, as a shared form of knowledge technology integrated into every aspect of our lives, the alphabet performs complex cultural, ideological, and technical functions, and her carefully curated selection of images demonstrates how closely the letters we use today still resemble their original appearance millennia ago"--