Literacy: A Visual History

Recent discoveries in the Middle East and new research from scholars worldwide have helped to rewrite what we previously knew—or thought we knew—about the birth and development of literacy and civilization. 

“Literacy: A Visual History” draws largely upon the leadership work of Bruce Zuckerman, a leading authority on ancient Near Eastern texts and inscriptions who leads an ongoing effort to document high resolution images of literacy artifacts and to distribute them worldwide for scholarly research and educational purposes.  The project is also inspired by historians and other scholars who link the power of traditional storytelling with new advances in media and information technology, library science, and the digitization of artifacts and primary documents. 

“Literacy” is a story that focuses on the invention of writing almost simultaneously in Mesopotamia and Egypt.  It traces the developments that led to the invention of alphabetic writing and the subsequent revolution in the spread of literacy—in the west, through the adoption of alphabetic writing by the Greeks and then the Romans; in the east with the spread of alphabetic writing through Aramaic and finally through Arabic scripts and their offshoots.

New data has forced scholars to rethink the traditional assumptions about how, when, and where writing developed.  Advances in imaging technologies have made it possible to look at the earliest texts with a clarity and detail previously not possible, and advances in communication through the internet have made it possible for images of the texts to be accessible to everyone for detailed study. 

Literacy: A Visual History is a co-production with Douglas-Steinman Productions.