Overview: 'NOVA: The First Alphabet' follows the evolution of the written word, from millennia-old carvings in an Egyptian turquoise mine to our modern-day alphabets.

'How Writing Changed the World' shows us how the printing press transformed the spread of information, igniting the Industrial Revolution.

But how did technologies–from pen to paper to printing press—make it all possible?

DVD Verdict: In the first documentary, 'A to Z: The First Alphabet,' the question is asked Where would we be without the world's alphabets?

Writing has played a vital role in the expansion and domination of cultures throughout history. But researchers are only now uncovering the origin story to our own alphabet, which may have gotten its beginnings in a turquoise mine thousands of years ago.

From the shape of the letter A to the role of writing in trade and storytelling, discover how the written word shaped civilization itself.

One theory is that the history of alphabetic writing goes back to the consonantal writing system used for Semitic languages in the Levant in the 2nd millennium BCE.

Most or nearly all alphabetic scripts used throughout the world today ultimately go back to this Semitic proto-alphabet. Its first origins can be traced back to a Proto-Sinaitic script developed in Ancient Egypt to represent the language of Semitic-speaking workers and slaves in Egypt.

Unskilled in the complex hieroglyphic system used to write the Egyptian language, which required a large number of pictograms, they selected a small number of those commonly seen in their Egyptian surroundings to describe the sounds, as opposed to the semantic values, of their own Canaanite language.

This script was partly influenced by the older Egyptian hieratic, a cursive script related to Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Mainly through Phoenician, Hebrew and later Aramaic, three closely related members of the Semitic family of scripts that were in use during the early first millennium BCE, the Semitic alphabet became the ancestor of multiple writing systems across the Middle East, Europe, northern Africa and South Asia.

The other documentary is 'How Writing Changed the World' where we are informed that just as writing changed the course of human history, the evolution of paper and printing revolutionized the spread of information.

The printing press kicked off the Industrial Revolution that fast-tracked us to the current digital age. But as the millennia-old tradition of penmanship falls out of favor, should we consider what might be lost in this pursuit of ever more efficient communication. This is a Widescreen Presentation (1.78:1) enhanced for 16x9 TVs.