Writing Around the Ancient Mediterranean: Practices and Adaptations

Writing in the ancient Mediterranean existed against a backdrop of very high levels of interaction and contact. In the societies around its shores, writing was a dynamic practice that could serve many purposes – from a tool used by elites to control resources and establish their power bases to a symbol of local identity and a means of conveying complex information and ideas.

This volume brings together contributions by members of the Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing Systems (CREWS) research team and visiting fellows, offering a range of different perspectives and approaches to problems of writing in the ancient Mediterranean. Their focus is on practices, viewing writing as something that people do within a wider social and cultural context, and on adaptations, considering the ways in which writing changed and was changed by the people using it.

Table of Contents

Approaches to writing in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East
Philippa M. Steele
Relations between script, writing material and layout: the case of the Anatolian Hieroglyphs
Willemijn Waal
Word division in Sicilian inscriptions
Robert Crellin
What is an Alphabet good for?
Csaba La’da
Measuring particularity and similarity in archaic Greek alphabets with NLP
Natalia Elvira Astoreca
Borrowing, invention, remodelling: Observations on the rare letters of the Phrygian alphabet and the problem of formation of Anatolian alphabets
Rostislav Oreshko
Cypro-Minoan and its potmarks and vessel inscriptions as challenges to Aegean Scripts corpora
Cassandra Donnelly
Ductus in Cypro-Minoan writing. Definition, purpose and distribution of stroke types
Martina Polig
The introduction of the Greek alphabet in Cyprus, a case study in material culture
Beatrice Pestarino
The death of alphabets at the end of the Bronze Age. How does the Deir ‘Alla alphabet fit the picture?
Michel de Vreeze
Early Egyptian writing from the perspective of the embodied practitioner
Kathryn Piquette
The magic of writing
Philip J. Boyes

Philippa M. Steele is the Director of the Crews Project, a Senior Research Associate at the Faculty of Classics, Cambridge, and a Senior Research Fellow of Magdalene College. Having previously been awarded a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship and the Evans Pritchard Lectureship at All Souls College, Oxford, She has published widely on ancient languages and writing systems with a particular focus on Cyprus and the Aegean.

Philip J. Boyes is a research associate at the Faculty of Classics, Cambridge, working on the social context of writing at Ugarit as part of The Crews Project. He has previously worked on the archaeology of the east Mediterranean and Levant in the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages.