The study of early writing

The purpose of writing, how it was transmitted from one culture to another, and its impact on society have been a highly contested field of study for many decades. The adoption of writing and the development of literacy had profound effects on ancient societies, but these are still imperfectly understood. This topic also poses many methodological problems, not least because structures of modern scholarship cut across the areas of study which are necessary to explore it fully. In this volume, Ruth Whitehouse (W.) aims to explore this from the standpoint of material culture. Although the title refers to writing throughout first millennium BC Italy, this volume is closely based on data gathered during two interconnected research projects which were limited to the development of writing in selected areas of Italy,Footnote ¹ specifically northeast Italy, Puglia, the Lepontic areas of northwest Italy and the orientalising and archaic inscriptions from Etruria.

In most previous studies of the subject, archaeologists, anthropologists, linguists and historians have all addressed the problem of the emergence of literacy and its implications for social and cultural development, but for the most part, they have worked in isolation from each other. The development of writing as a system, for instance, has tended to be studied in isolation from the social implications of literacy.Footnote ² There are also lively debates over the nature of writing between those who regard early writing, especially as preserved on durable materials, as essentially a visual and graphic medium and those who emphasise its role in storing and codifying information,Footnote ³ and on the interface between literacy and orality.Footnote ⁴ A fundamental division persists between those who propose a structural model of writing, with an emphasis on transcription of sounds, rules of script development and transmission or see it as a primarily graphic form, the creation of systems of signs and symbols, and those who see it as a cultural practice embedded within specific societies, which can only be understood in terms of the needs, culture and practices of these societies.Footnote ⁵ These are also topics which have generated a vast bibliography, so any overview must, of necessity, be brief and selective.

Until relatively recently, studies of the development of writing were dominated by an evolutionary approach to writing systems, which identified alphabetic literacy as the most easily transmissible form of literacy, and the Phoenician and Greek alphabets as the phenomenon which enabled literacy to spread beyond a class of specialist scribes.Footnote ⁶ However, this position is no longer tenable,Footnote ⁷ not least because there is evidence of some overlap between syllabic and alphabetic writing.Footnote ⁸ There is little or no evidence that specifically alphabetic literacy, rather than the social conditions of the areas adopting it, were responsible for the rapid spread of literacy. It is now widely accepted that different writing systems could coexist in the ancient world and that writing should be considered as a cultural artefact or practice which could show considerable variation within, and between, cultures.

The study of writing and literacy in early societies has been shaped by the seminal work of the anthropologist Jack Goody, whose “literacy thesis” argues that literacy creates the capacity for complex storage, recall and manipulation of information, and also prompts fundamental cognitive changes in the ways in which people categorise and process information and relationship with information, and is a fundamental enabling factor in the development of complex states.Footnote ⁹ This has been much critiqued but is especially problematic for archaic Greece and Italy,Footnote ¹⁰ where power and organisational structures of early complex states differ from those of Egypt, Mesopotamia and the palatial cultures and have a different relationship with writing. Literacy can only have the uniquely transformative effect postulated by Goody once it spreads beyond the very limited and controlled spheres of specialist/elite literacy, to an extent which is rare in the ancient world.Footnote ¹¹ The effects of literacy on the development of state and society depend to a high degree not just on the presence of literacy, but on what types and registers of literacy are present, who is learning, and controlling access to literacy skills and how widespread literacy is in various sectors of society.Footnote ¹² Other studies of literacy in early societies have broadly focused on the relationship between literacy and power structures in a more indirect sense, examining the role of literacy as a prestige technology, and inscribed objects or writing tools as prestige objects, access to (or exclusion from) which can confer or deny social status.Footnote ¹³ While it seems clear that there is a connection between the adoption of writing and the development of complex states, it is clearly not the instrumental and administrative connection envisaged by Goody.

One fundamental problem is that there is little consensus over how, why and when alphabetic writing developed, even in the Greek world. Proposed dates for the development of the Greek alphabet range from the fourteenth to ninth centuries BC, though the likelihood is that the Greek alphabet was adapted from Phoenician script in the ninth century, with a more intensive period of dissemination in the late ninth and eighth centuries. However, there is some evidence that there may be gaps in the evidence for the development of these scripts and that different writing systems can co-exist for significant periods of time.Footnote ¹⁴ It is also possible that several different forms of semitic scripts may have been used as a model. Astoreca has made a strong case for treating Greek epichoric scripts as independent developments from the beginning, drawing on elements from several different sources.Footnote ¹⁵ The Greeks themselves identified the Phoenicians as the source of their alphabet, referring to writing as phoinikeia grammata (Hdt. 5.57–61) and a scribe as phoinikastas or phoinikographos, but there is no clarity over whether these terms referred specifically to Phoenicians or several different semitic cultures. What is not in doubt is that writing spread rapidly throughout the Greek world during the eighth century BC.Footnote ¹⁶

The purposes for which writing was adopted are equally hotly debated. Powell’s thesis that the primary purpose was to record and codify epic poetry is not widely accepted, but other suggestions for the adoption and diffusion of writing include commercial use, votive practices and the needs of the elite, and argue that it was spread both by artisans and traders and via the elites which controlled long distance trade.Footnote ¹⁷

In early Italy, the focus of the book reviewed here, the situation is even more complex. It was a region with a plurality of different states, ethnic groups and cultures, all of which adopted writing at different points in time and show considerable differences in how they used it. There are many similarities between their uptake of writing and their practices of literacy, but there are also significant variations, both between different areas of Italy and between Italic societies and those of Greece.Footnote ¹⁸ Harris’s study of ancient literacy includes a mere eight pages on writing in pre-Roman Italy and barely mentions the adoption of writing outside Rome, concluding that literacy in archaic Italy and Rome was indistinguishable from that of Greece, but this is no longer sustainable.Footnote ¹⁹ Although there are few early inscriptions from Rome itself, and only a modest number from Latium, the high – and increasing – number from Etruria indicate that even in the archaic period, writing was well established in some areas of Italy, although by no means all.Footnote ²⁰ Although the Greeks and the Etruscans were the two biggest producers of written documents in pre-Roman Italy until at least the third century BC, each Italic culture and society developed its own culture of writing, according to their own needs and cultures and as Whitehouse argues in this volume, these must be studied in their own terms, not assumed to have the same cultures of writing as Greece and Etruria.

As already noted, scholarship on early writing is complicated by the fact that it spans many different methodologies and fields of research. Over the past three decades, the structuralist orthodoxy that writing systems should be approached primarily via linguistic analysis or technical analysis of the formation and transmission of alphabets and syllabaries has been challenged. New approaches place these developments in their sociocultural contexts and examine writing systems from the Bronze Age onwards as an interrelated phenomenon. The emphasis on structural analysis has been further challenged by approaches focusing on writing as a cultural practice, to be examined in terms of concepts such habitus, technological production and agency, in which the role of people in how writing was produced and consumed was central.Footnote ²¹ Treating writing as a form of material culture has proved to be a valuable avenue for exploring its development, transmission and uses. The methodologies developed by archaeologist to study the production of artefacts and the chaîne opératoire have contributed much to the understanding of writing as a material artefact.Footnote ²²

In the case of pre-Roman Italy scholars have traditionally adopted a structuralist approach, with a focus on language and philology, often at the expense of the social context of documents and their material form. Examination of writing and writing cultures all too often has taken second place to the philological analysis of ancient Italic languages perhaps because. unlike Greek or Latin, Italic languages are still only partially understood. Deciphering the meaning of inscriptions inevitably involves a considerable degree of philological analysis. However, this has sometimes had the unfortunate effect of relegating the social uses of writing and the materiality of inscribed objects to secondary status, a particular problem given that most of the surviving evidence for writing in is epigraphic and therefore relates to material items with a physical context. Much progress has been made over the past few decades by analysing inscribed objects in their context, where this is known.Footnote ²³ In many cases, contexts, locations and associations of finds are not recorded with any certainty, which creates problems in analysing inscribed objects, although evidence from more recent excavations with secure contexts has improved matters.Footnote ²⁴ Recent research has moved away from a narrowly linguistic approach and towards examining the adoption of writing as a social and cultural phenomenon, as well as a greater recognition that it is a visual as much as a verbal medium.Footnote ²⁵ By placing the development of writing within its social context, relating it to the development of statehood, power structures, cultural memory and elite culture as well as examining its development in the context of intercultural interactions and multicultural contexts, it can be better understood as the product of human interactions and agency, as well as of the technical production process.Footnote ²⁶ However, the problem remains that there were a multiplicity of cultures and ethnic groups in ancient Italy, all with their own writing cultures, while theoretical perspectives are often dominated by the writing of the Etruscans, the earliest adopters and most copious users of writing, and models drawn from Greece.

Writing as material culture

In this volume, Ruth Whitehouse (W.) adopts a more radical version of these methods. Her stated aim is to put materiality rather than language at the heart of her analysis and undertake a purely material analysis of inscribed objects. In this, she is guided – amongst other models – by McLuhan’s argument that “the medium is the message,” as well as by the work of a range of archaeologists examining the materiality of writing in relation to various ancient cultures.Footnote ²⁷ Refreshingly, she also engages with practitioners in the real world, including insights from those with experience of teaching writing and literacy skills in the contemporary classroom – a very different environment from that of early Italy, but one which can offer insights into the cognitive processes of learning to read and write.

Her focus on selected regions of Italy provides an excellent opportunity to redress one of the issues highlighted in the previous section by undertaking comparative regional studies of writing in several different areas of Italy, each with different cultural, ethnic and linguistic backgrounds. However, W.’s primary focus is on the earliest inscriptions from Etruria and some of the material from the Veneto for most of the work. Coverage of the other regions is much less extensive, and regions not included in the initial projects – for example, writing in Samnium, Campania and the Oscan speaking areas of Italy – are omitted entirely.Footnote ²⁸

The opening chapter sets out the parameters, describing the evidence to be used and arguing strongly against philological approaches in favour of one which focuses exclusively on material evidence. The nature of the surviving evidence means that this largely means examination of inscriptions on a variety of durable materials, including bone, ivory, metal, ceramics and stone. The practice of writing on perishable materials is known from early Italy but is indirectly attested from ancient sources, depictions of reading and writing in visual arts, votive models of writing implements, and the survival of writing tablets such as the example from Marsiliana d’Albegna. However, the only direct archaeological survival of writing in ink on perishable media from Etruria is the Zagreb mummy, a fragmentary liber linteus (linen book) preserved because it was reused to wrap a mummified body (8–9). W. also acknowledges the problematic quality of the epigraphic evidence. Much of it was excavated in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, when finds, their contexts and associations were not recorded to modern standards, and some are found on reused masonry or without any known context. In addition, many items are now lost and are known only from drawings and transcriptions. This limits the possibility of clear dates and associations between inscriptions and other artefacts, and there are doubts about linguistic attribution of short or fragmentary inscriptions. More significantly, W. also departs from the usual categories of “readers” and “writers,” recasting these as “producers” and “consumers” of writing, a useful tool for moving the debate away from accepted assumptions about literacy but one which creates some additional problems.

The first four chapters set up W.’s chosen analytical framework. Chapter two examines the various possible ways of classifying inscriptions by content, context and materiality, underlining how these classifications impact on interpretation. Classification by content is rejected as too linguistic and hampered by our limited understanding of Italic languages. This is a fair point in the context of longer inscriptions or abbreviated or fragmentary texts where the language cannot be securely identified.Footnote ²⁹ However, many of the earlier inscriptions are short and formulaic and their content is relatively clear. Classification by context is also identified as problematic, since many items do not have a securely recorded location or context. Instead, W. suggests classification by materiality as a way forward, defining this as the analysis of the relationship between writing and artefact and taking into account the size and scale of the inscription, its layout in relation to the shape of the artefact, its visibility, the methods by which it was produced, the tactility of the artefact and its probable function. This is a productive line of enquiry, since the earlier inscriptions are often inscribed in elaborate patterns and sometimes integrated with other design features. However, it faces problems of interpretation analogous to those of analysis by context, especially when it comes to interpreting the function or display context of items with no securely recorded location. Other arguments are more compelling, such as the differences in significance between inscriptions on small, portable objects and large stone structures. W. also explores sensory aspects such as touch, luminosity, and tactility of inscriptions as a factor in how the users might have experienced them and raises the question of the value added by inscriptions, given that they typically make up only a small minority of specific classes of object.

In chapters three and four, W. develops this argument further by creating a typology based on materiality. This distinguishes between writing on portable objects, sometimes intricately laid out to follow the shape of the item or its decoration, writing on larger structures such as stelae or tombs, and writing which formed part of the landscape, cut into natural rock surfaces, noting that these different contexts affect the visibility and legibility of the writing and therefore have a profound impact on the physical relationship between inscription and reader or viewer.Footnote ³⁰

Chapter five uses the anthropology of technology to examine how inscriptions were produced.Footnote ³¹ In it, W. considers the chaîne opératoire, the production of artefacts and the relationship between this and production of writing. However, the focus is primarily technical, focusing on the production processes. There is little discussion of whether the artisans were literate or not, although this is a topic that W. returns to in more detail later in the work. The discussion of the relationship between the commissioner of the object, commissioner of the inscription (not necessarily the same person) and the writer of the inscription (sometimes the author of the text and sometimes a specialist artisan) is also inconclusive.Footnote ³²

Given that only a tiny proportion of objects were inscribed, even within collections of very similar items (e.g. votive deposits or grave goods), a key question is why an inscription was sometimes added to an object, and what value this was perceived to have conferred on it. W. addressed this by examining three contrasting case-studies – the so-called Felsina stelae, a group of funerary stelae from Bologna with decoration in low relief, a deposit of bronze votive styluses from the sanctuary of Baratella near Este (Veneto), and a group of loom weights from Botromagno (Puglia) – selected as a means of examining three different contexts for the inscriptions, contrasting funerary commemoration, votive practices and evidence from settlement and domestic contexts (85–143). However, none of these provide conclusive answers and they all illustrate the difficulties of making inferences about inscribed artefacts without clear contexts or associated artefacts.

At Bologna, there is a small correlation between the presence of an inscription, the size of the stelae and richness of the grave-goods, suggesting that inscriptions were reserved for commemorating the most important members of the community, but the incompleteness of the archaeological record, especially with respect to grave goods, means that this conclusion is not clear-cut.Footnote ³³ At Este, the inscribed styluses tend to be larger than the uninscribed versions but most of the votives were found in unstratified deposits and given the lack of evidence for dating and the context in which they were displayed, little can be inferred about the value added by the inscription. The fact that most appear to have been dedicated by women offers a tantalising glimpse into ritual practices at the sanctuary and the connections between women and writing (a theme taken up later in the book) but offers little insight into the significance of adding an inscription to a votive offering. In the final case study (129–141), the loom weights from Botromagno also lack chronological and stratigraphic evidence, limiting the analysis to the conclusion that both decoration and inscription personalised a common functional object, and one which was also connected with female activities. W. provocatively suggests that the relatively low number of inscribed objects in each category may indicate that writing was of limited importance in 1^st millennium Italy, and hazards that it might have been regarded as a foreign technology, of limited relevance to Italic communities in the archaic period. However, this is complicated by lack of secure dating evidence for two of her case studies. It also runs contrary to evidence on the importance of writing in archaic Italy drawn from non-epigraphic sources.Footnote ³⁴

Chapters seven and eight depart from the strictly material approach, suggesting that an entirely material approach to the study of writing has some significant limitations. A striking feature of the earliest inscriptions from both Italy and Greece is that many of them are written in the first person, allowing the inscription, or even the object itself, depending on how they are interpreted, to “speak” to the reader.Footnote ³⁵ These are too numerous to ignore but they do not fit comfortably into W.’s methodology of focusing primarily on material aspects of writing. In this instance, she departs from the material approach and uses linguistic, anthropological and even legal arguments drawn from Roman law to problematise the inscription as an expression of ownership or gift exchange, arguing that especially in funerary contexts, the use of the first person represents an association between an individual and a commemoration rather than a strict degree of ownership of the tomb of monument. The observation that “speaking inscriptions” on artefacts given as gifts or votives have a different significance from those on tombs or grave markers adds force to the need to be more aware of the material context of inscriptions. Her argument – especially regarding agency and the primacy of object over language – though an interesting suggestion, is largely speculative, but the data reveals interesting distinctions between the form and chronology of first person inscriptions in the Veneto (largely votive and focused on the dedicator and deity) and those of Etruria, which are more often about social relationships between humans, especially in terms of gift exchange.

A different category of inscription, incised abecedaria and syllabaries examined in chapter eight, pose similar problems. These are found on many objects, ranging from the mundane and low value to the complex and high value, and include both complete and partial alphabets. However, W.’s analysis is limited to six of the earliest and most complete Etruscan examples, and the somewhat later Venetic votive tablets from the sanctuary of Reitia at Este-Baratella. The assumption is that the inscribed artefacts are all writing tools – either writing tablets, styluses or inkwells. However, this is not entirely clear cut. The use of styluses and tablets in writing is clear, and the votive models of these have a close association with writing, but the assumption that pottery vessels with abecedaria were used as inkwells depends principally on the nature of the inscription. It is also slightly odd that the wider significance of full or partial abecedaria, the significance of later examples of abecedaria or their chronological distribution in Etruria and elsewhere is not discussed.Footnote ³⁶ W. links the second case study, of the votive writing implements from the sanctuary of Reitia at Este-Baratella, to the teaching of writing and her comparison of modern teaching methods with the ancient data adds an interesting insight. W. concludes that in both Etruria and the Veneto, writing was taught principally in sanctuaries,Footnote ³⁷ despite the relative paucity of the evidence, and concludes that the ritual context is a sign of fetishisation of writing in the sense of endowing it with special or supernatural significance. This is not implausible, but it ignores other possible scenarios such as acquisition of writing as part of artisan training or teaching within households, and changes in how writing was taught in different periods.

Chapters nine and ten move on to an examination writing as a representation of various forms of social identity. In chapter nine (192–208), W. suggests, based on the high proportion of personal names in Italic inscriptions, that writing may have been an assertion of both self-identity and social classification, exploring the tension between these concepts and the ways in which writing as social identity may have been a way to define and constrain social roles and actions.Footnote ³⁸ Chapter ten (209–230) focuses on the specific theme of connections between gender and writing. Several earlier studies have suggested a conceptual link between writing and weaving, a prominent female activity across all social classes in ancient Italy, and noted the incidence of early inscribed objects in elite female burials.Footnote ³⁹ W. focuses on inscribed artefacts with female personal names (although she acknowledges the difficulty of interpreting damaged inscriptions or abbreviations and assigning gender to them) and on implements used in textile production, such as loom weights and spindle whorls. However, the most interesting insight comes from two ivory tokens from Poggio Civitate inscribed with female names. The excavators interpreted this as evidence that these tokens were not invariably (as previously assumed) tesserae hospitales Footnote ⁴⁰ on the ground that tesserae hospitales were mostly associated with elite trade and social exchange, and women would therefore have had no need for them. W. rightly challenges this, arguing that elite women may have played a more extensive role in Etruscan society – including trade and exchange – than previously acknowledged and possession of a tessera hospitalis by a woman cannot be ruled out.Footnote ⁴¹ Many of W.’s conclusions are speculative, but her discussion is a welcome corrective to many of the traditional assumptions about gender roles in Italic societies.

The final chapter (231–242) assesses the role of writing in ancient Italic societies. W. notes the sparse evidence for the administrative and commercial uses of writing, although she acknowledges the possibility of evidence which does not survive and instead, focuses on the uses of writing to maintain the solidarity of elite groups in society. However, she notes that it was used for practical purposes as well, mainly in manufacturing, and appears to have arrived in Italy via contact with literate foreign traders and artisans, suggesting that elite adoption was a form of appropriation of a practical technology used by artisans, which was practised by both men and women of the elite classes.

Problems, questions and future directions

This book offers an important new approach to the development of writing in Italy. It builds on the current direction of study, which places greater emphasis on social and cultural factors and emphasis the visual aspects of writing. However, W,’s focus on the materiality of inscribed objects and their spatial and visual display contexts offers further new insights. The volume is also refreshing in its willingness to challenge some established orthodoxies, especially about the role of women in some Italic societies and the assumption that technological innovation is invariably driven by men as innovators and early adopters.

However, W.’s approach also poses some problems. The first of these is the data used. Etruscan inscriptions are limited to those of the Orientalising and Archaic periods, but the other three case studies (of which only the Veneto is discussed in depth) are multi-period and concern areas where the adoption of writing was a later phenomenon. This raises questions about comparability between the different data sets used and this narrow focus sits uncomfortably with W.’s contention that the adoption and uses of writing are socially specific and must be approached in the light of each individual society. It would be fairer to describe this as a work about Etruscan writing rather than writing in Italy more generally. Although there are some similarities across Italic societies, there are also profound differences between regions in their chronology of adoption, use of writing and epigraphic habits which raise the question of the typicality of Etruria and the Veneto. One of the other regions studied as part of the Developmental Literacy project – Puglia – had a somewhat different epigraphic culture which would have repaid further discussion, while Campania – notable for being a point of contact and script developmentFootnote ⁴² – is largely absent. Although extending the discussion to these areas would be ambitious for a single monograph, it would have given a more rounded picture of the variations in cultures of writing in Italic societies. The provocative suggestion that writing may not have been very important to the Italian elite (142–3) is a case in point, because if true, it seems to be applicable principally to an early period and a specific social context, and does not cast much light on the development of writing and scripts beyond Etruria and one key site in the Veneto. It also cuts across other recent approaches to the topic which view writing as an important form of elite culture, especially as a way to display social identity and encode cultural memories of ancestors and clans.Footnote ⁴³

The second problem lies in the nature of the evidence. Although W. fully acknowledges the difficulties posed when studying inscriptions (sometimes fragmentary) with imperfectly documented contexts and no secure dating, this means that some of her conclusions are inevitably somewhat speculative. Perhaps the most problematic aspect, however, is the tension between W.’s emphasis on the importance of materiality and the focus on the content of the inscriptions in chapters seven, eight and nine which somewhat undermines the case for the feasibility of a methodology based entirely on material attributes. Although the development of ancient writing is framed in terms of an opposition between archaeology and linguistics/philology, she is unable to entirely separate the two, relying on some level of linguistic analysis to categorise the inscriptions. This volume is a valuable corrective to previous overreliance on philological approaches, but the Balkanisation between philological, archaeological, anthropological and cognitive approaches is unhelpful and its limits are revealed by the fact that W. is forced to find ways to analyse content as well as materiality. This is a very thought-provoking work, skilfully interweaving material and anthropological approaches to the evidence, the future direction of the study of early writing surely lies in communication and interaction between these disciplines, not further separation.