A review by jellygiraffe
A is for Ox: A Short History of the Alphabet by Lyn Davies

4.0

A super interesting and well-written history!! I've learnt so much about the alphabet. For example, one of the reasons some languages are read left to right, right to left, or both ways, is because it mimics the lines created by oxen ploughing fields! Also it wasn't rich folk or religious scribes who spread language and developed it but slaves who needed to speak to each other despite their varied backgrounds. Plus the letter 't' has remained pretty unchanged from early Semitic and Sumerian pictograms and was used to indicate a brand on an animal or person.

Did I write my own name in Phoenician letters? You bet I did.

Davies has a lovely final paragraph which made my inner linguistic heart sing:
'We are, unfortunately, left with only fragments of this early story – an offering to a goddess, a name on a dagger, graffiti scratched on a limestone cliff in the desert. But some of the gaps in our understanding can perhaps be filled by the realisation that today we are driven by the same impulses that have driven people throughout history – the impulse to express ourselves and record that expression, to list what we own, to write our names in order to give them some permanence – and that it was these very impulses that lead, around 4000 years ago, to the birth of the alphabet.'