The Greatest Invention: A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts | 誠品線上

The Greatest Invention: A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts

內容簡介

內容簡介 邁諾斯文明的斐斯托斯圓盤、中世紀的伏尼契手稿、印加帝國結繩記事、中國甲骨文，還有以一人之力發明的印地安切羅基文字⋯義大利波隆那大學愛琴海文明教授費拉拉爬梳人類的文化與社會行為，探索最偉大發明「書寫」的源起。她有如歷史偵探，帶領讀者穿梭時空，造訪美索不達米亞、克里特島、中國、埃及、中美洲、復活節島等地，解密書寫如何萌芽。‘Ferrara’s book is an introduction to writing as a process of revelation, but it’s also a celebration of these things still undeciphered, and many other tantalising mysteries besides.‘ - The SpectatorThis book tells the story of our greatest invention. Or, it almost does. Almost, because while the story has a beginning – in fact, it has many beginnings, not only in Mesopotamia, 3,100 years before the birth of Christ, but also in China, Egypt and Central America – and it certainly has a middle, one that snakes through the painted petroglyphs of Easter Island, through the great machines of empires and across the desks of inspired, brilliant scholars, the end of the story remains to be written.The invention of writing allowed humans to create a record of their lives and to persist past the limits of their lifetimes. In the shadows and swirls of ancient inscriptions, we can decipher the stories they sought to record, but we can also tease out the timeless truths of human nature, of our ceaseless drive to connect, create and be remembered.The Greatest Invention chronicles an uncharted journey, one filled with past flashes of brilliance, present-day scientific research and the faint, fleeting echo of writing’s future. Professor Silvia Ferrara, a modern-day adventurer who travels the world studying ancient texts, takes us along with her; we touch the knotted, coloured strings of the Incan khipu and consider the case of the Phaistos disk. Ferrara takes us to the cutting edge of decipherment, where high-powered laser scanners bring tears to an engineer’s eye, and further still, to gaze at the outline of writing’s future. The Greatest Invention lifts the words off every page and changes the contours of the world around us – just keep reading.‘The Greatest Invention is a celebration not of achievements, but of moments of illumination and “the most important thing in the world: our desire to be understood”.‘ - TLS

作者介紹

作者介紹 Silvia FerraraSilvia Ferrara, author of The Greatest Invention, is a Professor of Aegean civilization at the University of Bologna. She studied at University College London and the University of Oxford and, after several years as a researcher in Archeology and Linguistics at Oxford, she returned to Italy. She has taught at University College London, the University of Oxford, the University of Cambridge and the Sapienza University of Rome.

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