The social context of literacy in Archaic Greece and Etruria

Abstract

In recent years much emphasis has been placed upon the effects of literacy in the transformation of the Mediterranean World between 800 and 400 BC. Alphabetic scripts have been seen by many, archaeologists and classicists alike, as one of the key factors that made many of the achievements of Mediterranean, particularly Greek, thought and culture possible. Alphabetic scripts encouraged widespread literacy, and widespread literacy was the necessary condition for what remains distinctive in Ancient Greek culture, namely the development of History, Philosophy and speculative Natural Science. Murray (1980: 96) is typical in his view that ‘Archaic Greece was a literate society in the modern sense.’ The work of Goody & Watt (1963) has done much to advance the view that many of the achievements of Mediterranean Society can be ascribed to, if not entirely explained by, this ‘technology of the intellect’. Their ‘autonomous model’ however, as Cartledge (1978: 37) has observed, comes dangerously close to technological determinism.

Visible writing: questions of script and identity in Early Iron Age Greece and Cyprus

“…Much the same may be said of another suggestion, that writing was adopted as a symbol of élite status and self‐definition (Stoddart and Whitley 1988; cf. Schnapp‐Gourbeillon 2002, 311–14).…”

The Beginnings of Writing on Crete: Theory and Context

“…Old Germanic runes were used to personalise various objects with names and markers’ formulas, as efficient means of marking alliances and elite membership (Williams 2004). Etruria displayed literacy as a preserve of the elite and inscriptions represented arenas where ideological manipulation could be enacted, through the formulaic character of the texts, with its dual mode of communicating with group peers while distancing the rest: ‘at one level, the inscriptions may name individuals, at another level, they represent the power of the community of which they are part’ (Stoddard and Whitley 1988, 768).…”

“…The alphabet, albeit completely devoid of the deflections and artifice attributed to logography (Gelb 1963), had hardly a universal and unifying impact, its effects hardly determined by its simplicity. The early stages are idiosyncratic both in graphic configuration and in distribution: fragmented into epichoric varieties (Jeffery 1990), its uses are marked by regionalism and local preferences (Stoddard and Whitley 1988). Moreover, its alleged efficiency in application was instead restricted and limited to noting personal names and proprietorial concerns (Johnston 1983).…”

‘Reading the texts’: archaeology and the Homeric question

“…Finnegan 1988). The introduction of the alphabet in the mid 8th century is surely connected with the potential of writing as yet another instrument for elite self-definition (Stoddart & Whitley 1988); and the hexameter graffiti found on late 8th-or early 7th-century sherds at Athens and elsewhere bear witness to an early association between literacy and poetry. Yet it remains unlikely that poems quite so long as the Iliad and Odyssey were committed to writing in their entirety at this time, and unnecessary to invoke literacy as a practical aid to their composition.…”