This was one of the best ‘Very Short Introductions’ I've read so far: concise and yet encompassing almost all of the subject matter. Robinson provides a set of terminological instruments with which the various forms of writing can be analyzed and therefore better understood. It seems logical, but he makes it clear that language and writing must be distinguished, although they are obviously very closely linked. It is important to note that almost every writing system originated from a spoken language, and therefore always contains some form of phonetic component. This leads to curious observations, such as this that the Japanese language is fundamentally different from the Chinese, but that the Japanese did adopt the Chinese characters to write down their language, with the addition of some limited phonetic symbols. Robinson even supplies a few reading keys on a limited number of pages to be able to read, for example, cuneiform and hieroglyphic writing. Well done. ( )

Good introductory text on, well, writing and scripts. I thought it was organized a little oddly, with the first two-thirds or so being almost entirely about the writings/scripts themselves, and then the last third or so about the process of writing (scribes, technology and writing, etc.) This is just a personal preference, but more context for the scripts would have helped make them less abstract for me. But a good introductory text, I would like to read some of the author's other works as well. ( )

Robinson's Writing and Script: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2009) reads as a not-unproblematic statement of the communis opinio. I will not trouble myself with writing a full review, but even accepting the fact that specialists will always have gripes with these sorts of short summaries, I strongly feel the need to point out that AR's adherence to Powell's hypothesis on the origins of the Greek alphabet is idiosyncratic, and he fails altogether to mention competing views on the issue (e.g. Woodard 1997, etc.). Furthermore, his presentation of the decipherment of Linear B omits formidable contributions which ultimately allowed Ventris, with the help of Chadwick, to complete the decipherment (notably those of Kober, although AR's omission of this is not unexpected, as he vigorously marginalizes her contributions in his 2002 aggrandizing biography of Ventris). Lastly, a few small terminological issues, in current scholarship the term 'Hittite Hieroglyphics' (p.97) is obsolete (and it is quite to see the term used in a work published in 2009), and the notion of an Altaic family of languages (p.117) is tenuous at best. These specialist gripes aside, AR's book is an eminently readable, if overly popularizing, account of the phenomenon of writing and scripts in human societies.