The letters you are now reading came down to us, by way of Greek and Phoenician, from a Canaanite source probably developed in the Sinai between 1700 and 1500 B.C. Along with Chinese characters, which also appeared, curiously enough, around 1700 B.C., the proto-alphabet is ancestor to all living scripts, from Cyrillic to Persian to Armenian—this according to Johanna Drucker, whose mesmerizing book begins with a summary of origins as they are currently understood, and proceeds through the many accounts, both magisterial and loony, that humanity has given of its letters.

Or are they God’s? Across the religious spectrum and into the nineteenth century, writing was generally assumed to be of divine provenance; Ganesh even snapped off one of his tusks to use as an ur-pen. To the Kabbalists, the Hebrew alphabet comprised the very stuff by which God brought—or, more properly, wrote—the world into being, each letter with its attendant angel. They shared with Gnostics and alchemists (to name only the least fringy devotees) a belief in the alphabet as repository of hidden knowledge. The hapless neo-Pythagorean Iamblichus tried to tap that esoterica using alectryomancy–divination by means of a letter-pecking fowl; he may have been executed because a chicken predicted (accurately, as it turned out) the emperor’s death.

The Pythagoreans as a whole were partial to upsilon, whose “Y” shape suggested to them the forked paths open to the initiate.

Naturally, mavens had their pet favorites. The Pythagoreans as a whole