Silvia Ferrara

Silvia Ferrara is Professor of Mycenaean Philology and Aegean Civilisations at the University of Bologna and head of the INSCRIBE (INvention of SCRIpts and their BEginnings) project which, funded by the European Research Council, analyses the world’s earliest examples of writing from a multidisciplinary perspective combining archaeology and anthropology with cognitive studies and deciphering strategies.

She has published several works on the history of writing with the titles Il salto. Segni, figure, parole: Viaggio all’origine dell’immaginazione (Feltrinelli, 2021) and La grande invenzione. Storia del mondo in nove scritture misteriose (Feltrinelli, 2019), the latter of which has been translated into Spanish as La gran invención: Una historia del mundo en nueve escrituras misteriosas (Anagrama, 2022 – in English, The Great Invention: A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022). This accessible, educational study covers different epochs and territories in its exploration of written expression.