On the Invention of the Alphabet

First paragraph

Writing is arguably among the greatest of human technological inventions. Once writing was invented, the chisel, pen, and then keyboard have moved inexorably towards dominating human communication. Though writing is nearly ubiquitous in the twenty-first century, how often do we step back from our task and ask ourselves what we are actually doing or how representing language by an arbitrary set of shapes on asurface developed? If we pause to think about it, writing is a patently odd activity. We take what belongs to the world of sound and translate it to the visual and material world with ink, graphite, or pixels in forms that have an arbitrary relationship to the sounds they represent.