Blurb:

In the Preface to this book we present briefly the gap in scholarship that we have sought to address, describing the conference at which we brought scholars together with the intention of addressing that gap and going as far as we could beyond the article in which Stephen Houston, John Baines, and Jerrold Cooper (2003) had made an initial exploration of relevant issues and given short case studies. Probably the vast majority of the writing systems that have existed in the world have fallen out of use and, if now known at all, either are no longer intelligible or have been deciphered in the last couple of centuries. Yet the process of loss of writing systems has hardly been studied, even though such systems constitute the most developed mode of visual–verbal communication in material form that many societies have created, as well as generally, but not always, having profound meaning for those societies.