'The Greatest Invention' by Silvia Ferrara
Chatty and poetic by turns, Silvia Ferrara ranges across the history of writing with a focus on a handful of the systems by which humanity has inscribed its thoughts and events. Sober analysis leaps into imaginative flights as she connects the dots between widely separated times and places. Reading The Greatest Invention is like a wild conversation at a party with a smart, slightly intoxicated stranger.
A professor of Aegean civilization at the University of Bologna, Ferrara’s special interest in scripts that remain undeciphered—such as Cretan hieroglyphics and Linear A—becomes a platform from which to wonder about the invention of writing itself and what those graven signs say about humankind. Writing enables us to “create things that don’t exist in nature”—such as governments and other institutions—as well as exchange information.
On one page Ferrara calls writing “a social invention,” evolving through “a process, a series of coordinated, cumulative, and gradual actions.” On the next page, writing “is also deeply ingrained in our versatile ability to see with our own eyes while—at the same time, in the same moment, and almost by magic—seeing the world through the very different eyes of others.” She goes on to describe the “alphabet in things,” how the shapes of letters and glyphs are found in nature.
The various symbolic vocabularies devised by humanity seem to have begun in pictures. First we drew, then we wrote, sums up the general theory of writing’s origins as presented by Ferrara. She has some fascinating and unresolved thoughts about “the link between the names we give to things and their reality.” She takes controversial stands, supporting (with good reason) the theory that the tablets found on Easter Island are evidence not of decorative arts but an alphabet unlike any other in the world.
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The Greatest Invention may raise a few eyebrows in academia, but Ferrara’s enthusiasm is contagious for us non-specialists. “Do you ever find yourself dwelling on the syllable as an inexhaustible source of mystery?” she wonders, adding, “Nobody in their right mind thinks that way—but I do. And I’m not alone.”
