Table of Contents:
- Introduction : a difficult topic, little studied, poorly understood
- What is writing?
- Writing with signs
- Categories and features of writing
- Some general issues in the study of writing
- Protocuneiform and counting tokens
- Origins of lexigraphic writing in Mesopotamia
- Plato's Ideas and Champollion's decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphs
- Egyptian writing and Egyptian speech
- The origin and nature of Egyptian writing
- "The house of life" : scribes and writing in ancient Egypt
- Syllabic scripts of the Aegean
- The West Semitic revolution
- What kind of writing was West Semitic?
- The origins of West Semitic writing
- Chinese logography
- Lexigraphic writing in Mesoamerica
- The Greek alphabet : a writing that changed the world
- Summary and conclusions.