Elements in Writing in the Ancient World – serie

Hieratic was the most widely used script in ancient Egypt, but is today relatively unknown outside Egyptology. Generally written with ink and a brush, it was the script of choice for most genres of text, in contrast to hieroglyphs which was effectively a monumental script. The surviving papyri, ostraca and writing boards attest to the central role of hieratic in Egyptian written culture, and suggest that the majority of literate people were first (and not infrequently only) trained in the cursive script. This Element traces the long history of hieratic from its decipherment in the nineteenth century back to its origins around 2500 BC, and explores its development over time, the different factors influencing its appearance, and the way it was taught and used.

Poised as middlemen between the Ancient Near East and the Aegean, writers of Cypro-Minoan, the undeciphered Late Bronze Age script of Cyprus, borrowed and transformed writing practices from their neighbors and invented new ones. Bits and pieces of the script are found throughout the Mediterranean, but there are few clay tablets, characteristic of neighboring scribal-based, administrative writing traditions. Instead, Cypro-Minoan writers wrote on mercantile objects, outside of scribal schools. As the administrative centers of the eastern Mediterranean collapsed c. 1177 BCE administrative writing systems went with them. Cypro-Minoan remained in use, presaging the spread of the Phoenician alphabet. This Element explores the role of writing and trade during the collapse period and introduces readers to the Cypro-Minoan script, its history, and approaches to its decipherment, showing that writers of an undeciphered script can still communicate when we take the care to look for them.

Poised as middlemen between the Ancient Near East and the Aegean, writers of Cypro-Minoan, the undeciphered Late Bronze Age script of Cyprus, borrowed and transformed writing practices from their neighbors and invented new ones. Bits and pieces of the script are found throughout the Mediterranean, but there are few clay tablets, characteristic of neighboring scribal-based, administrative writing traditions. Instead, Cypro-Minoan writers wrote on mercantile objects, outside of scribal schools. As the administrative centers of the eastern Mediterranean collapsed c. 1177 BCE administrative writing systems went with them. Cypro-Minoan remained in use, presaging the spread of the Phoenician alphabet. This Element explores the role of writing and trade during the collapse period and introduces readers to the Cypro-Minoan script, its history, and approaches to its decipherment, showing that writers of an undeciphered script can still communicate when we take the care to look for them.

The Bronze Age Aegean and Cyprus were home to a plethora of scripts, including Cretan Hieroglyphic, Linear A and Linear B, Cypro-Minoan and Cypro-Syllabic. This Element is dedicated to the conventionally named 'Minoan' Linear A script, used on Crete and the Aegean islands during the Middle and Late Bronze Age (ca. 1800-1450 BCE). Linear A is still undeciphered, and the language it encodes ('Minoan') thus remains elusive. Notwithstanding, scholars have been able to extract a good amount of information from Linear A inscriptions and their contexts of use. Current ongoing research, integrating the materiality of script with linguistic analysis, offers a cutting-edge approach with promising results. This Element considers Linear A within an investigative framework as well as narrative, shedding light on a number of burning questions in the field, often the subject of intense academic debate.

The Bronze Age Aegean and Cyprus were home to a plethora of scripts, including Cretan Hieroglyphic, Linear A and Linear B, Cypro-Minoan and Cypro-Syllabic. This Element is dedicated to the conventionally named 'Minoan' Linear A script, used on Crete and the Aegean islands during the Middle and Late Bronze Age (ca. 1800-1450 BCE). Linear A is still undeciphered, and the language it encodes ('Minoan') thus remains elusive. Notwithstanding, scholars have been able to extract a good amount of information from Linear A inscriptions and their contexts of use. Current ongoing research, integrating the materiality of script with linguistic analysis, offers a cutting-edge approach with promising results. This Element considers Linear A within an investigative framework as well as narrative, shedding light on a number of burning questions in the field, often the subject of intense academic debate.

Proto-Elamite is one of the world's earliest scripts and it remains only very partly deciphered. Excavations have uncovered c. 1,700 clay tablets from Iran, dating c. 3300-2900 BCE. The tablets use a complex system involving hundreds of symbols to count commodities, people, and institutions. Despite holding a privileged place in the history of writing, the study of proto-Elamite falls outside modern disciplinary boundaries and has received very limited scholarly attention since its discovery over a century ago. Nonetheless, a handful of scholars have shown that there is much we can learn about proto-Elamite and the people who used it, especially by taking interdisciplinary approaches. The ongoing decipherment project combines mathematics, a range of comparative studies, and a sustained effort to digitize the corpus and apply new tools from computer science.

Proto-Elamite is one of the world's earliest scripts and it remains only very partly deciphered. Excavations have uncovered c. 1,700 clay tablets from Iran, dating c. 3300-2900 BCE. The tablets use a complex system involving hundreds of symbols to count commodities, people, and institutions. Despite holding a privileged place in the history of writing, the study of proto-Elamite falls outside modern disciplinary boundaries and has received very limited scholarly attention since its discovery over a century ago. Nonetheless, a handful of scholars have shown that there is much we can learn about proto-Elamite and the people who used it, especially by taking interdisciplinary approaches. The ongoing decipherment project combines mathematics, a range of comparative studies, and a sustained effort to digitize the corpus and apply new tools from computer science.

Hieratic was the most widely used script in ancient Egypt, but is today relatively unknown outside Egyptology. Generally written with ink and a brush, it was the script of choice for most genres of text, in contrast to hieroglyphs which was effectively a monumental script. The surviving papyri, ostraca and writing boards attest to the central role of hieratic in Egyptian written culture, and suggest that the majority of literate people were first (and not infrequently only) trained in the cursive script. This Element traces the long history of hieratic from its decipherment in the nineteenth century back to its origins around 2500 BC, and explores its development over time, the different factors influencing its appearance, and the way it was taught and used.

This Element examines - for the first time in a single volume - the written evidence from the 'Far East' of the Hellenistic world (Bactria, Sogdiana, Arachosia, Gandhara). It examines how successive invaders of this region, from Persia, Greece and India, left their linguistic and textual mark. It reviews the surviving Hellenistic-period written material from archaeological sites in Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Pakistan in Aramaic, Greek and Prakrit.