Professor’s Video To Debut at Historical Society

A new video tracing “Signs, Symbols and Scripts: Origins of Written Communication and the Birth of the Alphabet” will premiere at a free public screening Sept. 17 at 7:30 p.m. in the Wisconsin State Historical Society auditorium, opposite the Memorial Union.

Writer and director Menahem Mansoor, professor emeritus of Hebrew and Semitic studies, will introduce the program, which was preceded in 1982 by a nationally-touring exhibition. Mansoor says the video will examine the evolution of written communication from ancient rock and cave paintings through pictures, signs, Chinese symbols, cuneiform, hieroglyphs and the development of various writing systems.

“Working, researching, writing and lecturing on the origins of written communication, I marvel at the strong desire and obsession of humans to communicate with each other,” Mansoor says. “Thus, it is surprising that the invention of the first alphabet is only 35,000 years old. Prior to it there was no recorded writing, and no history.”

The screening is sponsored by the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters in cooperation with the UW–Madison Department of Hebrew and Semitic and the Madison Biblical Archaeological Society. For more information, contact Richard Daniels or Gail Kohl at the Academy, 263-1692.