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Silvia Ferrara's The Greatest Invention is a code-cracking tour around the globe, sifting through our cultural and social behavior in search of the origins of our greatest invention -- writing.The L where a tabletop meets the legs, the T between double doors, the D of an armchair's oval backrest -- all around us is an alphabet in things. But how did these shapes make it onto the page, never mind form such complex structures as this sentence?

In The Greatest Invention, Silvia Ferrara takes a profound look at how -- and how many times -- human beings have managed to produce the miracle of written language, taking us back in time to Mesopotamia, Crete, China, Egypt, Central America, Easter Island, and beyond.With Ferrara as our guide, we examine the enigmas of undeciphered scripts, including famous cases like the Phaistos disk and the Voynich Manuscript; we touch the knotted, colored strings of the Incan khipu; we study the turtle shells and ox scapulae that bear the earliest Chinese inscriptions; we watch in awe as Sequoyah invents a script all on his own; and we venture to the cutting edge of decipherment, where high-powered laser scanners bring tears to an engineer's eye.