Reviews

The Story of Writing: Alphabets, Hieroglyphs, & Pictograms by Andrew Robinson

kaia001's review

informative medium-paced

3.0

linnjbookis's review against another edition

4.0

Enkel, givande och lättläst kurslitteratur gällande skriften och handskriftens historia

politizer's review against another edition

1.0

I had never heard of this book until one of my students quoted it in an essay. The quotation was, "Without writing there would be no history. In all civilizations, scribes have been the transmitter of culture, the first historians." This is such self-evident bullshit (I mean, oral traditions exist, and often predate writing systems) that I don't know how it got published. Of course, people with no linguistic training trying to write books about linguistic topics and doing a bad job of it is nothing new. Still, no one should read this garbage.

darrin's review

5.0

The Story of Writing was not what I expected and more than I expected. I bought the book because of my interest in ancient scripts, languages and archaeology thinking it would be a good general overview. When I first glanced through it I thought I had bought a book more oriented toward middle school audience....that would be a wrong assumption. It is not an in depth scholarly work written for an audience with a graduate degree but it is still an engaging book for a later high school, freshman college level. It covers all of the major ancient scripts including cuneiform, Egyptian and Mayan hieroglyphs and much more. It goes into just enough depth to get you interested in learning more which I am sure is exactly what the author intended. The illustrations, explanations and examples are all well done. I didn't know a lot about cuneiform prior to reading this book and now I want to learn more. Also, even after reading several books about Mayan hieroglyphs I have never been able to understand the calendar system until Andrew Robinson was able to illustrate and explain it in such a clear way.

Very good. I recommend this to anyone with a budding interest in scripts and ancient languages.