Bacon francis

1999 · 10997 — New York London Paris: Abbeville Press Publishers - National Museum of American Art - Smithsonian Institution 1999. First Edition First Printing . Hard Back. Very Good/Very Good. 6 1/4" x 8 3/4. 381 Pages. Light green cloth with embossed spine red and front lettering. The usual high quality paper and cloth binding that we have come to expect from Abbeville Press. Translated from the French. Illustrations on almost all pages. Attractive red endpapers. No dust jacket flap price. Instead the original $39.95 is part of the UPC on the back of the dust jacket. This book offers a light-hearted and fascinating voyage back to the origins of our alphabet based on the pictograms of 3500 years ago. Bestselling author and teacher Marc-Alain Ouaknin has created a book for many readers --- for teenagers and adults scholars and the merely curious. In Mysteries of the Alphabet he tells how proto-Sinaitic pictograms-derived from Egyptian hieroglyphics and discovered in the Sinai only at the beginning of the twentieth century-evolved through the millennia and left their traces on our alphabet. Ouaknin coins the term archaeography to describe his study of a word's meaning not only through its etymology but also through its image through the forms of its letters. His interest is not only serious: he suggests that his readers play the game of reading their own names and other words in pictograms --- after all the name you're given influences who you turn out to be. Contents: Introduction. Part Origin and Development ---- Short History of Writing Pictogram Ideogram and Phonogram The Lady of the Turquoise Proto-Sinaitic Script the Example of the Letter Aleph and When Aleph Became Alpha. Part Two: The Alphabet. Part Three: The Archeographic Revolution. Plus Bibliography and Acknowledgements and Picture Credits. <br/> <br/> Abbeville Press Publishers - National Museum of American Art - Smithsonian Institution hardcover