Table Of Content

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 (01865) 241249 Telephone (610) 853-9131, Fax (610) 853-9146 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