Writing Around the Ancient Mediterranean. : Mediterranean Practices and Adaptations / / Volume 6 : / Philippa M. Steele.

• Superior document: Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing Systems (CREWS)
• VerfasserIn: Steele, Philippa M.,
• Place / Publishing House: Oxford : : Oxbow Books,, 2022.
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Series: Contexts of and relations between early writing systems (Series)
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (iv, 266 pages) :; illustrations.

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 presents a group of papers 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. They focus 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

List of contributors .v -- Acknowledgements vi -- 1. Introduction: approaches to the study of writing, and the development of the CREWS project 1 -- 2. What is an alphabet good for? 9 -- 3. The 'death' of alphabets at the end of the Bronze Age: how does the Deir ʿAlla alphabet fit the picture? .23 -- 4. Cypro-Minoan and its potmarks and vessel inscriptions as challenges to Aegean Scripts corpora 49 -- 5. Ductus in Cypro-Minoan writing: definition, purpose and distribution -- of stroke types 75 -- 6. The magic of writing in the Late Bronze Age East Mediterranean 99 -- 7. Relations between script, writing material and layout: the case of -- the Anatolian Hieroglyphs .121 -- 8. The rare letters of the Phrygian alphabet revisited 145 -- 9. Measuring particularity and similarity in Archaic Greek alphabets with NLP 167 -- 10. The introduction of the Greek alphabet in Cyprus: a case study -- in material culture 181 -- 11. Word-level punctuation in Latin and Greek inscriptions from Sicily of the Imperial period 195 -- 12. Speculative Syllabic .221 -- Bibliography .243.