Paths Into Script Formation in the Ancient Mediterranean PDF Download

Author: S. Ferrara
Publisher:
ISBN: 9788871408989
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 216

View

Book Description

Author: Philippa M. Steele
Publisher: Oxbow Books
ISBN: 1789259029
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 322

View

Book Description
Writing does not begin and end with the encoding of an idea into a group of symbols. It is practiced by people who have learnt its principles and acquired the tools and skills for doing it, in a particular context that affects what they do and how they do it. Nor are these practices static, as those involved exploit opportunities to adapt old features and develop new ones. The act of writing then has tangible and visible consequences not only for the writers but also for those encountering what has been produced, whether they can read its content or not – with potential for a wider social visibility that can in turn affect the success and longevity of the writing system itself. With a focus on the syllabic systems of the Bronze Age Aegean, this book attempts to bring together different perspectives to create an innovative interdisciplinary outlook on what is involved in writing: from structuralist views of writing as systems of signs with their linguistic values, to archaeological and anthropological approaches to writing as a socially grounded practice. The main chapters focus on the concepts of script adoption and adaptation; different methods of logographic writing; and the vitality of writing traditions, with repercussions for the modern world. Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing Systems (CREWS) is a project funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No. 677758), and based in the Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge.

Author: Philip J. Boyes
Publisher: Oxbow Books
ISBN: 1789255848
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 497

View

Book Description
By the 13th century BC, the Syrian city of Ugarit hosted an extremely diverse range of writing practices. As well as two main scripts – alphabetic and logographic cuneiform - the site has also produced inscriptions in a wide range of scripts and languages, including Hurrian, Sumerian, Hittite, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Luwian hieroglyphs and Cypro-Minoan. This variety in script and language is accompanied by writing practices that blend influences from Mesopotamian, Anatolian and Levantine traditions together with what seem to be distinctive local innovations. Script and Society: The Social Context of Writing Practices in Late Bronze Age Ugarit explores the social and cultural context of these complex writing traditions from the perspective of writing as a social practice. It combines archaeology, epigraphy, history and anthropology to present a highly interdisciplinary exploration of social questions relating to writing at the site, including matters of gender, ethnicity, status and other forms of identity, the relationship between writing and place, and the complex relationships between inscribed and uninscribed objects. This forms a case- study for a wider discussion of interdisciplinary approaches to the study of writing practices in the ancient world.

Author: Natalia Elvira Astoreca
Publisher: Oxbow Books
ISBN: 1789257468
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 144

View

Book Description
Most scholarship on early Greek alphabetic writing has focused on the questions around the origin of 'the Greek alphabet', instead of acknowledging the diversity of alphabetic systems that emerged in Geometric and Archaic Greece. The research concerning the so-called epichoric scripts was introduced by Kirchhoff in the 19th century and saw its highest point in the 1960s with the works of Jeffery and Guarducci. Nevertheless, recent epigraphical finds and new possibilities offered by digital tools call for a revised, comprehensive study of these alphabets. Unlike previous research, which was mostly concerned with palaeography, this book presents a linguistic analysis of the epichoric alphabets that follows the latest trends in grapholinguistics and the methodology of comparative graphematics. The latter is a branch of writing systems research focused on the relationship between graphemes and the values that they represent and compares them across writing systems. This study compares the different Greek alphabets in their earliest stages, i.e. 8th and 7th centuries BC, also taking into account other contemporaneous alphabets, like those for Phrygian, Eteocretan and the Italic languages. Through the analysis of the data provided by the epigraphic texts dated within the chronological framework of this thesis, it is possible to identify the different notation systems that Greek-speakers devised to represent their dialects in writing. This brings new insights on the innovations created by these communities and the different alphabetic traditions present in Greece and across the Mediterranean. The conclusion of the book emphasizes the need to study these regional alphabets independently, rather than considering them as part of a unified entity - 'the Greek alphabet' - which did not exist at the time, and creates a new line for future research that intends to frame them individually within the ecology of ancient Mediterranean alphabets.

Author: Ben Haring
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009400789
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 162

View

Book Description
Introduces the workings and uses of Egyptian hieroglyphs, the various degrees of cultural knowledge of their makers and – most importantly – the influence hieroglyphs had on other scripts and notations in antiquity.

Author: Philip John Boyes
Publisher:
ISBN: 1789254817
Category : SOCIAL SCIENCE
Languages : en
Pages : 385

View

Book Description
Writing is not just a set of systems for transcribing language and communicating meaning, but an important element of human practice, deeply embedded in the cultures where it is present and fundamentally interconnected with all other aspects of human life. 'The Social and Cultural Contexts of Historic Writing Practices' explores these relationships in a number of different cultural contexts and from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including archaeological, anthropological and linguistic. It offers new ways of approaching the study of writing and integrating it into wider debates and discussions about culture, history and archaeology.

Author: John Bennet
Publisher: Oxbow Books
ISBN: 1789256429
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 353

View

Book Description
This volume presents a series of reflections on modes of communication in the Bronze Age Aegean, drawing on papers presented at two round table workshops of the Sheffield Centre for Aegean Archaeology on ‘Technologies of Representation’ and ‘Writing and Non-Writing in the Bronze Age Aegean’. Each was designed to capture current developments in these interrelated research areas and also to help elide boundaries between ‘science-based’ and ‘humanities-based’ approaches, and between those focused on written communication (especially its content) and those interested in broader modes of communication. Contributions are arranged thematically in three groups: the first concerns primarily non-written communication, the second mainly written communication, and the third blurs this somewhat arbitrary distinction. Topics in the first group include use of color in wall-paintings at Late Bronze Age Pylos; a re-interpretation of the ‘Harvester Vase’ from Ayia Triada; re-readings of the sequence of grave stelae at Mycenae, of Aegean representations of warfare, and of how ritual architecture is represented in the Knossos wall-paintings; and the use of painted media to represent depictions in other (lost) media such as cloth. Topics in the second group range from defining Aegean writing itself, through the contexts for literacy and how the Linear B script represented language, to a historical exploration of early attempts at deciphering Linear B. In the third group Linear B texts and archaeological data are used to explore how people were represented diacritically through taste and smell, and how different qualities of time were expressed both textually and materially; the roles of images in Aegean scripts, complemented by a Peircian analysis of early Cretan writing; a consideration of the complementary role of (non-literate) sealing and (literate) writing practices; and concludes with a further exploration of the color palette used at Pylos.

Author: Louis C. Jonker
Publisher: African Sun Media
ISBN: 1991201176
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 368

View

Book Description
Multilingualism remains a thorny issue in many contexts, be it cultural, political, or educational. Debates and discourses on this issue in contexts of diversity (particularly in multicultural societies, but also in immigration situations) are often conducted with present-day communicational and educational needs in mind, or with political and identity agendas. This is nothing new. There are a vast number of witnesses from the ancient West-Asian and Mediterranean world attesting to the same debates in long past societies. Could an investigation into the linguistic landscapes of ancient societies shed any light on our present-day debates and discourses? This volume suggests that this is indeed the case. In fourteen chapters, written and visual sources of the ancient world are investigated and explored by scholars, specialising in those fields of study, to engage in an interdisciplinary discourse with modern-day debates about multilingualism. A final chapter – by an expert in language in education – responds critically to the contributions in the book to open avenues for further interdisciplinary engagement – together with contemporary linguists and educationists – on the matter of multilingualism.

Author: Ramon Sarró
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009199498
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 219

View

Book Description
Combines biography, art, and religion to explore Kongo identity and culture, and the relationship between innovation and revelation.

Author: Silvia Ferrara
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198908768
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 349

View

Book Description
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Writing from Invention to Decipherment contains a wealth of global scholarship on ancient writing systems from China, Mesopotamia, Central America, and the Mediterranean, to more recent newly created scripts such as the Rongorongo from Easter Island, the Caroline Island scripts, as well as the alphabet. The aim is to dig into the foundations of writing, showcasing the complexities and varieties of scripts, from their invention to the potential decipherment of poorly understood scripts. The volume offers state-of-the-art research on undeciphered scripts from the Aegean (as for example, Cretan Hieroglyphic and Linear A) or not completely deciphered (as for example Maya) scripts. From a methodological perspective, these contributions lay out how and why writing was invented, who used it, and to what ends. Here writing is presented as a multi-modal cultural phenomenon, that intersects and transcends neat discipline boundaries, within an inclusive approach bridging archaeology, linguistics, epigraphy, and cognitive studies.