Writing Around the Ancient Mediterranean: Practices and Adaptations [Hardcover]

Writing in the ancient Mediterranean existed against a backdrop of very high levels of interaction and contact. In the societies around its shores, writing was a dynamic practice that could serve many purposes  from a tool used by elites to control resources and establish their power bases to a symbol of local identity and a means of conveying complex information and ideas.This volume brings together contributions by members of the Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing Systems (CREWS) research team and visiting fellows, offering a range of different perspectives and approaches to problems of writing in the ancient Mediterranean. Their focus is on practices, viewing writing as something that people do within a wider social and cultural context, and on adaptations, considering the ways in which writing changed and was changed by the people using it.Perspectives on and approaches to problems of early writing in the ancient Mediterranean.Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing Systems (CREWS) is a European Research Council funded project hosted at the Faculty of Classics, Cambridge. Its aims and scope are on new approaches to the history of writing, with a focus on writing systems of the ancient Aegean, Eastern Mediterranean and Levant (c.2000-600 BC).This sixth volume in the innovative and prestigious CREWS series on ancient writing systems comprises proceedings of the third CREWS conference, November 2021Focusing mainly on societies in and around the eastern half of the Mediterranean area, from Sicily to the Levant and from Anatolia to Egypt, the papers apply a range of innovative approaches to the practice and adaptation of early writing systemsPapers examine relations between script, writing material and layout of hieroglyphic systems, consider technical aspects of word divisions and stroke types and present case studies on the introduction, development and expression of early alphabets in different parts of the region from the later Bronze Age[TlS%