Writing Around the Ancient Mediterranean: Practices and Adaptations

273 Pages·2022·10.099 MB·English

by  Philippa M. Steele, Philip J. Boyes

Writing Around the
Ancient Mediterranean
Practices and Adaptations
edited by
Philippa M. Steele and Philip J. Boyes
Oxford & Philadelphia
Published in the United Kingdom in 2022 by
OXBOW BOOKS
The Old Music Hall, 106–108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JE
and in the United States by
OXBOW BOOKS
1950 Lawrence Road, Havertown, PA 19083
© Oxbow Books and the individual contributors 2022
Hardback Edition: ISBN 978-1-78925-850-9
Digital Edition: ISBN 978-1-78925-851-6
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022940624
An open-access on-line version of this book is available at: http://books.casematepublishing.
com/Writing_Around_the_Ancient_Mediterranean.pdf. The online work is licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence. To view a copy of this license, visit
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro
Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA. This licence allows for copying any part of
the online work for personal and commercial use, providing author attribution is clearly stated.
Some rights reserved. No part of the print edition of the book may be reproduced or transmitted in
any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any
information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the publisher in writing.
Materials provided by third parties remain the copyright of their owners.
Printed in the United Kingdom by Short Run Press
Typeset in India by Lapiz Digital Services, Chennai.
For a complete list of Oxbow titles, please contact:
UNITED KINGDOM UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Oxbow Books Oxbow Books
Telephone [phone] Telephone [phone], Fax [phone]
Email: [email protected] Email: [email protected]
www.oxbowbooks.com www.casemateacademic.com/oxbow
Oxbow Books is part of the Casemate Group
Front cover: Silver-gilt bowl from Dhali, Cyprus, c.725-675 BC, with Cypriot syllabic inscription and decoration
including Egyptian hieroglyphs. The Cesnola Collection, Purchased by subscription, 1874–76.
Back cover: Seal of Tarkasnawa, King of Mira, c. 1220 BC. Walters Art Museum, CC BY-SA 3.0.
Contents
List of contributors .................................................................................................................v
Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................vi
1. Introduction: approaches to the study of writing, and the development
of the CREWS project ........................................................................................................1
Philippa M. Steele
2. What is an alphabet good for? ........................................................................................9
Csaba A. La’da
3. The ‘death’ of alphabets at the end of the Bronze Age: how does the
Deir (cid:636)Alla alphabet fit the picture? ...............................................................................23
Michel de Vreeze
4. Cypro-Minoan and its potmarks and vessel inscriptions as challenges
to Aegean Scripts corpora ..............................................................................................49
Cassandra M. Donnelly
5. Ductus in Cypro-Minoan writing: definition, purpose and distribution
of stroke types ..................................................................................................................75
Martina Polig
6. The magic of writing in the Late Bronze Age East Mediterranean ........................99
Philip J. Boyes
7. Relations between script, writing material and layout: the case of
the Anatolian Hieroglyphs ...........................................................................................121
Willemijn Waal
8. The rare letters of the Phrygian alphabet revisited ................................................145
Rostislav Oreshko
9. Measuring particularity and similarity in Archaic Greek alphabets
with NLP ..........................................................................................................................167
Natalia Elvira Astoreca
iv Contents
10. The introduction of the Greek alphabet in Cyprus: a case study
in material culture ......................................................................................................181
Beatrice Pestarino
11. Word-level punctuation in Latin and Greek inscriptions from Sicily
of the Imperial period ................................................................................................195
Robert S.D. Crellin
12. Speculative Syllabic .....................................................................................................221
Charles ‘Pico’ Rickleton
Bibliography .........................................................................................................................243
List of contributors
PHILIP BOYES and
Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge
Center for Hellenic Studies (Harvard University)
Sidgwick Avenue
3100 NW Whitehaven Street,
Cambridge, CB3 9DA
Washington, D.C.
ROBERT CRELLIN USA
Faculty of Classics, Oxford University [email protected]
Ioannou Centre for Classical & Byzantine Studies
BEATRICE PESTARINO
66 St. Giles’
The Haifa Center for Mediterranean History,
Oxford, OX1 3LU
University of Haifa
[email protected]
199 Aba Khoushy Ave, Mount Carmel
MICHEL DE VREEZE Haifa, Israel
Honorary Research Fellow [email protected]
Department of Archaeology, Durham University
MARTINA POLIG
South Road
Ghent University, Faculty of Arts and Philosophy
Durham, DH1 3LE
Campus Boekentoren
[email protected]
Blandijnberg 2
CASSANDRA M. DONNELLY B-9000 Ghent
ComPAS ERC-Project, University of Cyprus Belgium
12 Gladstonos
and
Nicosia, Cyprus
[email protected] The Cyprus Institute, STARC
20 Konstantinou Kavafi Street
NATALIA ELVIRA ASTORECA
2121, Aglantzia
Former CREWS PhD Student
Nicosia
[email protected]
Cyprus
CSABA LA’DA [email protected]
Institut für Alte Geschichte und Altertumskunde,
CHARLES (PICO) RICKLETON
Papyrologie und Epigraphik, Universität Wien
[email protected]
Universitätsring 1/Stg. II/HP
1010 Wien PHILIPPA STEELE
Austria Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge
Sidgwick Avenue
and
Cambridge, CB3 9DA
Department of Classical and Archaeological [email protected]
Studies, University of Kent
WILLEMIJN WAAL
Cornwallis North West
Netherlands Institute for the Near East (NINO),
Canterbury, CT2 7NF
Leiden University
[email protected]
Witte Singel 25
[email protected]
2311 BG Leiden, The Netherlands
ROSTISLAV ORESHKO [email protected]
CNRS/UMR 8167 ‘Orient et Méditerranée’,
28 rue Serpente, 75006,
Paris, France
Acknowledgements
This volume presents the proceedings of a conference, ‘Writing around the Ancient
Mediterranean: Practices and Adaptations’, which took place on 18 and 19 November
2021. We had originally hoped that, like the previous two CREWS conferences, we
would be able to hold this as an in-person event at the University of Cambridge;
however, the continuing global pandemic stymied these plans and in the end it
had to be an online event. Nevertheless, some of the presenters chose to come to
Cambridge for these days and we are grateful to the Faculty of Classics for providing
space from which they could access the online presentations, and to our CREWS
Project Administrator Sarah Lewis for all her hard work behind the scenes making this
conference (like the others before it) a success. We also wish to thank all the presenters
and participants who helped to make this such a stimulating set of discussions, as
well as the peer reviewers who gave their time to improve this publication of the
papers. It was particularly gratifying that, despite the online platform and all the
awkwardness that usually entails, we managed to capture some of the warmth and
collegiality of our in-person conferences.
This conference, like the CREWS project as a whole, has received funding from the
European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research
and innovation programme (grant agreement No 677758). We are very pleased to
gratefully acknowledge their support in facilitating this research and these fruitful
collaborations.
Pippa Steele would like to thank her partner, James, and her mother, Anne, for
keeping her going with their love and kindness over this whole period. Philip Boyes
would like to thank his wife, Jennie, for all her love and support during the preparation
for the conference and the production of this book.
Chapter 1
Introduction: approaches to the study of writing,
and the development of the CREWS project
Philippa M. Steele
I hope the reader will indulge me in writing this perhaps unusual introductory chapter,
which will focus on contextualising the present conference volume as a contribution to
the research output of the CREWS project (Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing
Systems). I suppose most readers will pass it by, especially those who have come to
the volume following a trail of references to track down just one of the papers – that
is the fate of most conference volumes eventually, after all. However, as the CREWS
project draws to a close, with this as its penultimate published volume, I hope it will
be of interest to some to offer a few reflections on what CREWS has been about and
what we have tried to contribute to the study of writing. Since this conference was
always intended as a culmination of the CREWS project, at which we would present
the research of the core CREWS research team and wider CREWS family, this is also a
useful opportunity to explain how the papers in this volume and their authors have
fitted into (and in other ways expanded) the project’s remit.
Back in 2015 I submitted an application for funding to bring a quite abstract idea
in my head into reality, an idea revolving around the ways I had originally learnt to
talk about writing systems and the quite different ways I had started to think about
writing systems as I began to conduct my own research. I was used to the old narrative
that grouped writing systems in terms of their linguistic properties, labelling them
as alphabets if they encoded each sound with a separate sign, syllabaries if they
encoded whole syllables, abugidas or semi-syllabaries if they did something between
the two, and so on. These are helpful designations to be sure, but it often felt that
the people doing the writing and the place of writing activities in society had gone
missing somewhere. Can you really understand the way a writing system represents
language completely in isolation from questions surrounding its users and usage? A
second problem also preyed on my mind, after spending many years working on the
2 Philippa M. Steele
syllabic systems of the Bronze Age Aegean and Cyprus: what exactly do we mean when
we say that two writing systems are related to each other? We might sometimes talk
about ‘families’ of writing systems, but is the quasi-Darwinian terminology we apply
in historical linguistics (language families, ancestors and descendants, etc.) really
appropriate here? Writing system developments are the product of complex and
socially contextualised motivations and changes, and there are no ‘sign laws’ or ‘letter
laws’ in the same way that we assume there are sound laws, no regularity in writing
system changes such as that hypothesised for sound changes. But if those traditional
approaches originating from linguistic research are not the best ways of approaching
such questions, then what methods should we use? And what about other kinds of
interactions between writing systems and the people and societies using them? And
on the back of these sorts of questions, the idea for the CREWS project came about.
The project was funded in 2016, and over the last six years has developed in some
ways that I had hoped for, and a whole range of other ways I had not expected.
Contexts and relations, practices and adaptations
I have to admit that the choice of the words ‘practices’ and ‘adaptations’ in the title
of this book and the conference preceding it may not have been entirely unrelated to
the desire to find a nice acronym. But more seriously, I was thinking of ‘practices and
adaptations’ as an interesting proxy for the words ‘contexts and relations’ that have
been enshrined in the title of the CREWS project from the beginning. For example,
studying context very often involves thinking about the ways and places in which
something was done, i.e. its practice, and writing systems and practices tend to
undergo adaptation both at the point of their borrowing from one group by another
and throughout their lifetimes, creating relationships between different traditions
in different situations.
We have talked in more detail in the previous CREWS conference volume
about some of the different ways in which writing can be approached, whether
the perspectives are structuralist or culturally driven, or whether they stem from
linguistic, (social-)archaeological, anthropological or other disciplinary backgrounds
(Boyes et al. 2021). Those reflections stemmed from our efforts both to try to approach
writing from new and interesting angles, and to bring some of those different angles
together to gain deeper insights into the way writing works. Some of those efforts
originate from the direct research of the core CREWS research team (on which more
below), but they were also bolstered and inspired by interactions with other scholars
working on a range of ancient writing systems, including CREWS Visiting Fellows (the
‘CREWS family’, many of whom contributed to this volume) and other friends and
colleagues who participated in our conferences and other events.
The core CREWS research team consists of four researchers, each pursuing a
different case study situated somewhere around the eastern half of the Mediterranean:
Natalia Elvira Astoreca, Philip Boyes, Robert Crellin and me as PI. Natalia took a novel,
1. Introduction 3
graphematic approach to the diversity of the epichoric Greek alphabets of the Archaic
period, an archetype example of a set of systems whose properties have usually been
discussed as if the individual systems had diverged from an unattested common
ancestor; she viewed their differences not in terms of their palaeography (which has
been the focus of most previous studies) but rather as a series of potential different
solutions to linguistic problems, teasing apart different motivations for different
types of variation and presenting what have traditionally been referred to as ‘local
scripts’ as fully independent writing systems (Elvira Astoreca 2021). Philip took a
social-archaeological approach to the practice of writing at Bronze Age Ugarit, seeing
writing as intrinsically and dynamically bound up with a whole range of other ideas
and practices, and establishing how we might pursue more holistically an ‘archaeology
of writing’; by studying the wider social and political context of writing, this made
it possible to explore the people and places involved in its practice (Boyes 2021a).
Robert, following a first stage of research on the phenomenon of vowel writing in
different systems (e.g. Crellin 2020 focused on Neo-Punic), contributed a monograph
comparing the practice of word division in Greek and Northwest Semitic writing and
its relationship with prosody and orality; although ostensibly dealing with linguistic
analysis of orthography, the results help us to understand the design and context of
these writing traditions as they point strongly towards features being motivated by a
desire to make what is written easier to read aloud (Crellin 2022). My own research as
PI has drawn together some of these strands, among others, to attempt to establish an
integrated approach to writing, using the syllabic systems of the Bronze Age Aegean
as a test case (Steele forthcoming, presaged in Steele 2020) – since this research is
not yet published, I won’t venture to comment on what it may contribute to the field
of writing studies just yet.
The combination of the specificity of the case studies, alongside the much wider
applicability of the methodological approaches pursued, matches the original aims
of the CREWS project well: to contribute to the fields of research on particular
ancient writing systems while pursuing methodological innovation that helps us to
rethink the ways writing works and the ways we talk about it. Along the way this
involved a lot of group discussion, bringing together different material and different
approaches and trying to identify overlapping areas of interest and common ground,
as well as having fun with some very revealing practical experiments that helped
us to understand the experiences of ancient writers. Rather than pointing towards
commonalities between different writing traditions, this helped us to appreciate the
extent to which writing in any one society can only be understood fully on its own
terms and within its own unique context.
The CREWS Visiting Fellowship scheme gave an opportunity to expand the CREWS
remit both in terms of methodology and especially in terms of the range of writing
systems and societies in focus. Most Visiting Fellows have contributed a major piece
of their CREWS-related research to this volume, on which see further below. However,
there were some colleagues from the CREWS family who were unable to contribute to