A compact, readable history that follows the invention and transformation of writing from prehistoric marks and pictographs through cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs to the emergence of alphabets, syllabaries and logographic systems around the world; it explains how writing arose to record transactions, law, religion and stories, how scripts spread and branched (from Phoenician to Greek and Latin, from Brahmi to Indic scripts, alongside the long continuity of Chinese characters), and how scholars cracked ancient scripts, while also showing the social and technological effects of printing, standardization and digital encoding on literacy, identity and the preservation of texts.