The write side of history

A book that takes readers on a guided tour of some of the world's oldest and most mysterious scripts

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

Author: Silvia Ferrara (Translated by Todd Portnowitz)

Publisher:  Picador Pan Macmillan

Pages: 304

Price: Rs 599

Cats “meow” (English), “miao” (Italian), “meo” (Vietnamese), and “myao” (Russian). In Greek, they “ma”. This similarity played a role in the deciphering of Crete’s Linear B script. A stylised cat “as sketched by Walt Disney” represents the ma sound in this 3,000-year-old Bronze Age script, which records an equally ancient dialect of Greek. The consonance is unusual, incidentally, since other animal noises are usually represented differently in different languages — dogs bark, guk, and bhok, for