If something is important, we write it down. Yet 85% of the world's writing systems are on the verge of vanishing - not granted official status, not taught in schools, discouraged and dismissed.

When a culture is forced to abandon its traditional script, everything it has written for hundreds of years - sacred texts, poems, personal correspondence, legal documents, the collective experience, wisdom and identity of a people - is lost.

This Atlas is about those writing systems, and the people who are trying to save them. From the ancient holy alphabets of the Middle East, now used only by tiny sects, to newly created African alphabets designed to keep cultural traditions alive in the twenty-first century: from a Sudanese script based on the ownership marks traditionally branded into camels, to a secret system used in one corner of China exclusively by women to record the songs and stories of their inner selves: this unique book profiles dozens of scripts and the cultures they encapsulate, offering glimpses of worlds unknown to us - and ways of saving them from vanishing entirely.

How is it possible to write down the Japanese language exclusively in Chinese characters? And how are we then able to determine the language behind the veil of the Chinese script as Japanese? The history of writing in Japan presents us with a fascinating variety of writing styles ranging from phonography to morphography and all shades in between. In Japanese Morphography: Deconstructing hentai kanbun, Gordian Schreiber shows that texts traditionally labelled as "hentai kanbun" or "variant Chinese" are, in fact, morphographically written Japanese texts instead and not just the result of an underdeveloped skill in Chinese. The study fosters our understanding of writing system typology beyond phonographic writing.

Winner of the 2020 Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion: Historical Studies In her groundbreaking investigation from the perspective of the aesthetics of religion, Isabel Laack explores the religion and art of writing of the pre-Hispanic Aztecs of Mexico. Inspired by postcolonial approaches, she reveals Eurocentric biases in academic representations of Aztec cosmovision, ontology, epistemology, ritual, aesthetics, and the writing system to provide a powerful interpretation of the Nahua sense of reality. Laack transcends the concept of "sacred scripture" traditionally employed in religions studies in order to reconstruct the Indigenous semiotic theory and to reveal how Aztec pictography can express complex aspects of embodied meaning. Her study offers an innovative approach to nonphonographic semiotic systems, as created in many world cultures, and expands our understanding of human recorded visual communication. This book will be essential reading for scholars and readers interested in the history of religions, Mesoamerican studies, and the ancient civilizations of the Americas. "This excellent book, written with intellectual courage and critical self-awareness, is a brilliant, multilayered thought experiment into the images and stories that made up the Nahua sense of reality as woven into their sensational ritual performances and colorful symbolic writing system." - David Carrasco, Harvard University

This work focuses the social context of writing in ancient Western Arabia in the oasis of ancient Dadan, modern-day al-'Ula in the northwest of the Arabian Peninsula between the sixth to first centuries BC. It offers a description and analysis of the language of the inscriptions and the variation attested within them. It is the first work to perform a systematic study of the linguistic variation of the Dadanitic inscriptions. It combines a thorough description of the language of the inscriptions with a statistical analysis of the distribution of variation across different textual genres and manners of inscribing. By considering correlations between language-internal and extralinguistic features this analysis aims to take a more holistic approach to the epigraphic object. Through this approach an image of a rich writing culture emerges, in which we can see innovation as well as the deliberate use of archaic linguistic features in more formal text types.

In late 2011, photographer Douglas Holleley mounted an alphabet of wooden letters on a plywood base and placed it in the backyard of his home in Rochester, NY. His hypothesis was simple; to investigate the behavior of snow as it accumulated on a low-relief, three-dimensional object-in this case, as mentioned before, an alphabet of wooden letters. As the year progressed, Holleley continued to photograph through Spring, Summer and Autumn finishing around Christmas 2012. As such, in addition to the effects of the rain, snow and ice the alphabet is also graced with seeds, flowers, leaves and other traces of the seasons. Thus the book expanded from its original concept. What began as a simple observation of snow falling on a surface transformed into a gentle, and at times poignant, meditation on the nature of time and change.

Essays illuminating a complex and sophisticated musical manuscript. The Segovia Manuscript (Cathedral of Segovia, Archivo Capitular) has puzzled musicologists ever since its rediscovery at the beginning of the twentieth century. It is unique: no other manuscript of the period transmits a comparable blend of late fifteenth-century music, consisting of 204 sacred works and vernacular pieces in Flemish, French, Italian, and Spanish. An important group of pedagogical pieces by French and Flemish composers may preserve transcriptions of instrumental improvisation. This summary might suggest a messy collection, but on the contrary the manuscript is arranged with care, copied by one proficient scribe (except perhaps for the Spanish texts), who obviously followed a predetermined master plan. But which plan, who designed it, and why was the person responsible so interested in this combination? The essays here aim to treat every dimension of this fascinating source. New discoveries help date the manuscript and explain how it came to Segovia; particular attention is paid to the main scribe, now determined to be Flemish, and his relation with northern composers and repertory, above all that of Jacob Obrecht, Alexander Agricola, and Henricus Isaac; and the vexed question of the conflicting attributions is considered afresh and found to affect only a few of the fascicles. The contributors also look at questions of ownership and function. . WOLFGANG FUHRMANN is Professor of Musicology at Leipzig University; CRISTINA URCHUEGUIA is Professor of Musicology at the University of Bern. Contributors: Bonnie J. Blackburn, Wolfgang Fuhrmann, Leofranc Holford-Strevens, Tess Knighton, Kenneth Kreitner, Honey Meconi, Emilio Ros-Fabregas, Cristina Urchueguia, Rob C. Wegman

The Materiality and Efficacy of Balinese Letters examines traditional uses of writing on the Indonesian island of Bali, focusing on the power attributed to Balinese script.The approach is interdisciplinary and comparative, bringing together insights from anthropological and philological perspectives. Scholars have long recognized a gap between the practices of philological interpretation and those of the Javano-Balinese textual tradition. The question is what impact this gap should have on our conception of 'the text'. Of what relevance, for example, are the uses to which Balinese script has been put in the context of ceremonial rites? What ideas of materiality, power and agency are at work in the production and preservation of palm-leaf manuscripts, inscribed amulets and other script-bearing instruments? Contributors include: Andrea Acri, Helen Creese, Richard Fox, H.I.R. Hinzler, Annette Hornbacher, Thomas M. Hunter and Margaret Wiener.

Indonesian Manuscripts from the Islands of Java, Madura, Bali and Lombok discusses aspects of the long and impressive manuscript traditions of these islands, which share many aspects of manuscript production. Many hitherto unaddressed features of palm-leaf manuscripts are discussed here for the first time as well as elements of poetic texts, indications of mistakes, colophons and the calendrical information used in these manuscripts. All features discussed are explained with photographs. The introductory chapters offer insights into these traditions in a wider setting and the way researchers have studied them. This original and pioneering work also points out what topics needs further exploration to understand these manuscript traditions that use a variety of materials, languages, and scripts to a wider public.

This book deals with the De Bry collection of voyages, one of the most monumental publications of Early Modern Europe. It analyzes the textual and iconographic changes the De Bry publishing family made to travel accounts describing Asia, Africa and the New World. It discusses this editorial strategy in the context of the publishing industry around 1600, investigating the biography of the De Brys, the publications of the Frankfurt firm, and the making of the collection, as well as its reception by Iberian inquisitors and seventeenth-century readers across the Old World. The book draws on a wide variety of primary sources, and is hence important for historians, book historians, and art historians interested in the development of Europe's overseas empires. Originally published in hardcover.

Through a unique combination of narrative history and primary documents, this book provides an engrossing biography of Sequoyah, the creator of the Cherokee writing system, and clearly documents the importance of written language in the preservation of culture. Sequoyah's creation of an easy-to-learn syllabary for the Cherokee nation enabled far more than the Cherokee Phoenix, the first newspaper of the Cherokee Nation, and the ability for Native Americans to communicate far more effectively than word of mouth can allow. In many ways, the effects of Sequoyah's syllabary demonstrate the critical role of written language in cultural preservation and persistence. Sequoyah and the Invention of the Cherokee Alphabet is a readable study of Sequoyah's life that also discusses Cherokee culture as well as the historical and current usage and impact of the Cherokee syllabary he created. While the emphasis of the work is on Sequoyah's adult life between 1800 and 1840, enough pre- and post-history information is provided to allow any reader to fully grasp the contextual significance of his accomplishments. The book includes a biography section of key individuals and contains a collection of primary documents that helps illustrate the usage of Sequoyah's syllabary. A page from the Cherokee Phoenix showing the use of written Cherokee language in Sequoyah's syllabary A Cherokee syllabary chart A bibliography of sources that describes the focus of each entry and identifies its benefit and intended audience Photographs of road signs in Cherokee, NC written in English and in the Cherokee syllabary

In this pioneering work, based upon interviews with many of the surviving protagonists, Cornelis ('Cees') Andriesse tells the story of the role that Dutch publishing houses played in the rise of English language commercial science publishing after the Second World War, that was preceded by the decline of science publishing in German. Using the existing literature as well as many privately held archival sources, the author follows the fortunes of the leading publishers, Martinus Nijhoff, Elsevier and North Holland while also briefly discussing smaller houses like Dr. W. Junk and Reidel. The book contains lively portraits of the main characters involved and will no doubt stimulate further research and discussion of the role of publishing in the history of science. The authors main thesis that successful publishing requires a strong, fruitful partnership between an academic publisher and an academic editor, will no doubt convince most readers. This is a great book on the most productive friendships and partnerships in the history of science publishing.

Inscriptions are a rather neglected field within Tibetan Studies, because they are often located in places that are not easily accessible for both geographical and political reasons. It is thus especially welcome that two of the contributions to this volume deal with inscriptions documented on recent field trips to Tibet: Benjamin Wood discusses an inscription in Zha lu that relates an enigmatic conflict in the history of the monastery, and Kurt Tropper looks into an epigraphic cycle on the life of the Buddha in Tsaparang. Moreover, Nathan Hill provides a new interpretation of the beginning of the famous Rkong po inscription, and Kunsang Namgyal Lama surveys the various kinds of texts found on tsha tshas. An extra level of reflection is added to the volume by Cristina Scherrer-Schaub's methodological considerations on the classification and interpretation of inscriptions.