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 imitate an actual event. The pictogram apart fro being the first object drawn could be used to relate to other things that were connected with this particular object by using mental processes which were more or less based upon reality or conventional thinking. Thus, the outline of a foot as a pictogram becomes a symbol for walking, of the verbs to go, to walk, and to stand. The fact that a sign can be used to indicate an abstraction or an idea transforms the pictogram into an ideogram. An ideogram is generally a set of various images grouped together, such as mouth + bread = eat or mouth + water = to drink. Pictographic writing cannot be anything but a reminder of a message. A new, different sign was needed to represent the spoken signs of language. The sound of the pictogram was preserved but it no longer referred to an image or object. This sign became a phonogram, it represented and recorded a phonogram. The image still exists in the latter but it no longer refers to the image. In the pictogam of a "foot," only the 'f' is retained as a foot-sound not to the foot-picture.This principle, which is called "acrophonic" gave rise to the signs known as the alphabet. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.