Scope and Contents

The three calligraphic drawings by Lalou include the Hebrew letters Ian, Shin and Daled. These are original drawings whereas the text is printed in 30 copies. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents The subtitle of the book is "The Origins of writing." Part one consists of "Origin & Development;" part two "The Alphabet;" in which each letter is separately traced from the Proto-Sinaitic down to the modern alphabets; part three"the Archeographic Revolution." The book is dedicated to the Proto-Sinaitic or Proto-Semitic alphabet discovered during excavations in the Sinai desert, that was used for writing a Semitic language by the Hebrew slaves in Egypt. Proto-Sinaitic consisted of pictograms. It is the alphabet from which the Canaanite, Phoenician, Aramaic, paleo-Hebrew, Hebrew, Greek, and Arabic scripts were derived, continuing down to the modern European alphabets, via Etruscan and Latin. Reproductions of stylized Hebrew calligraphy by Frank Lalou (pages 73-75, 245, 259, 269, 331) and a shaped poem in Arabic (page 59) by Massoudy are included in the book. Oukaknin describes the birth of a letter and the alphabet. The first stage is pictographic, i.e., images or drawings that...