Ferrara, Silvia: - Silvia Ferrara is a professor of Aegean civilization at the University of Bologna. She studied at University College London and the University of Oxford, and after spending several years researching archaeology and and linguistics at Oxford, she returned to Italy. She has taught at University College London, the University of Oxford, the University of Cambridge, and Sapienza University of Rome. She is the author of The Greatest Invention and the academic book Origins of Writing in the Eastern Mediterranean, among others.