The Greatest Invention

A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts

The L where a tabletop meets the legs, the T between double doors, the D of an armchair's oval backrest—all around us is an alphabet in things. But how did these shapes make it onto the page, never mind form complex structures such as this sentence? In The Greatest Invention, Silvia Ferrara takes a profound look at how—and how many times—human beings have managed to produce the miracle of written language, traveling back and forth in time and all across the globe to Mesopotamia, Crete, China, Egypt, Central America, Easter Island, and beyond.

With Ferrara as our guide, we examine the enigmas of undeciphered scripts, including famous cases like the Phaistos Disk and the Voynich Manuscript; we touch the knotted, colored strings of the Inca quipu; we study the turtle shells and ox scapulae that bear the earliest Chinese inscriptions; we watch in awe as Sequoyah single-handedly invents a script for the Cherokee language; and we venture to the cutting edge of decipherment, in which high-powered laser scanners bring tears to an engineer's eye.

A code-cracking tour around the globe, The Greatest Invention chronicles a previously uncharted journey, one filled with past flashes of brilliance, present-day scientific research, and a faint, fleeting glimpse of writing's future.

©2019 Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore; English translation copyright 2022 by Todd Portnowitz (P)2022 Tantor

Fascinating ride through writing's history

I learned a lot about early scripts, how they're created and how people decipher them. Chapters are short and easy to digest. The narrator/translator spoke very clearly and compellingly. Highly recommend!

Interesting…but also awkwardly and unnecessarily essentialistic

An interesting history of writing. The history itself is fascinating…but the author’s writing feels awkward and problematic at times. She is a flowery writer whose prose is filled with metaphors and insightful comparisons, but also a lot Eurocentric essentialism. She writes poetically about the scripts of Cyprus as if they capture some essence of Europe and gets awkwardly less flowery and more dismissive when writing about non-European scripts. All of this is completely unnecessary; the book would have been just as compelling if we didn’t take the step of presuming that written language is somehow expressive of the heart of a people or a place.

Awfy

Terrible, painfully read! Chopped up drivel. Never ending strokes of genius. Self adoration at its best.

Very wordy but not very informative

I've listened to a number of audiobooks on languages and writing but thought this one was very short on novel content and was largely a lot of odd wanderings and endless random thoughts by the author. I didn't feel I learned much about the actual scripts at all.