Lydia Wilson

Lydia Wilson is a research associate at the Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge and a visiting scholar at the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies at City University New York. She edits the Cambridge Literary Review, writes for both academic and popular publications and recently hosted the BBC series A Secret History of Writing.

Stories from this author

Hieroglyphs line the walls in a shrine to the goddess Hathor at Serabit el-Khadim.

Who Invented the Alphabet?

New scholarship points to a paradox of historic scope: Our writing system was devised by people who couldn’t read