From antiquity to the modern age, legal, documentary, exegetical, literary, and linguistic traditions have viewed the relationship between image and letter in diverse ways. There is a long history of scholarship examining this relationship, probing the manner and meaning of its dynamics in terms of equivalency, complementarity, and polarity.

This volume addresses the pictorial dimension of writing systems from cross-cultural and multidisciplinary perspectives. Historians--including specialists in art and literature--paleographers, and anthropologists consider imagistic scripts of the...