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

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Steele, Philippa M., 1983- author.

Series:

Contexts of and relations between early writing systems (Series)

Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing Systems (CREWS)

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

History, Ancient.

Writing.

Mediterranean Region.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (iv, 266 pages) : illustrations.

Place of Publication:

Oxbow Books 2022

Oxford : Oxbow Books, 2022.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

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.

Notes:

CC BY-NC

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