In this lively history of writing, six goofy birds - a penguin, two toucans, an owl and two chickens - team up to tour the world of writing: how it developed, where alphabets came from, and the
origins of international languages such as Latin, Esperanto and Morse Code. They begin their time-travelling journey in 4000 BCE with the Sumerians, who invented pictograms out of the necessity
to keep trading records. One of the toucans flies on a kite tail to China to learn about characters, the penguin walks like an Egyptian in full headdress across the desert sands to uncover
hieroglyphs, and then there’s a mad rush of characters who pass the idea of an alphabet around Europe and the Near East.
