Chapter Two - Alphabets

This chapter highlighted the evolution of letters from being mere ideographs and pictographs to more of the phonetic lettering we have today. The early writing systems were unwieldy and required long, hard study to master. For centuries, the number of individuals who gained literacy was small. The invention of the alphabet was a major step twords easy human communication. An alphabet is a set of visual symbols or characters used to represent the elementary sounds of a spoken language. The hundreds of signs and symbols required for hieroglyphs were replaced by twenty easily learned signs. What was very intresting was the Semitic alphabetical script. It used thirty cuneiformlike characters to represent elementary consonant sounds, but there were no characters to signify vowels. It goes into a bit about the Arabic alphabet, but then continues on about the modern western alphabet and it's development through the greek alphabet and later the latin alphabet.

I found the evolution of the Aramaic alphabet to be the most intresting, how they created the shapes that they chose and why. Its such a more 'artful' form of writing with long thick strokes.

The only questions I have from this chapter are from the beautiful Greek signature seals. If they had such an advanced alphabet then why did tehy need to use Animals on their seals? And not just use their name?