Abnormal Interests

Wouldn't this not-so-alleged public literacy spread outward from the Near East to explain the eventual adoption of alphabets by Greeks and Etruscans afterall? Perhaps I'm missing facts, but it just seems like the expected thing to me.

Glen,

I'm not sure exactly what you are asking. It as been conventional wisdom among Semitists that the adoption of the alphabet drove literary and that cuneiform was just too hard to learn without half a lifetime of training. And that therefore, only the trained scribes could and did read and write in cuneiform. Tied up with this is the whole question of literacy in ancient Israel. Many of those who think it nearly unimaginable for there to have been literate professionals writing in cuneiform tend also to think that that there was much wider literacy in Israel because of alphabetic writing than is decisively supported by the small amount evidence. Most of these folks don't pay much attention to Phoenician and the westward spread of the alphabet. They tend to care even less about southward spread of the alphabet. My own view is that this is largely wishful thinking driven by questionable views concerning the development and adoption of the Hebrew Bible or its individual books as theologically authorities. I may be misreading this but this the way it looks to me. By the way, based on the ancient Hebrew epigraphic material, there can be little doubt that there were literate professionals in Israel as well as professional scribes just like there seems to have been elsewhere. How widespread this literacy among professionals was is debatable. That it extended below the professional strata is even more debatable. There just isn't enough evidence to form a clear, unambiguous picture. I am among those who think that literacy is far more dependent on cultural considerations than on the difficulty of the writing system. (Today, literacy is quite high in urban China and their writing system seems at least as complex as cuneiform.) The alphabet, if it had a role at all, had, in my mind, a very small part in the process. Therefore, as far as populations developed literacy from each other, I think that development followed cultural pathways that may have been different than the pathways by which a given writing system propagated. I also think that choices and changes in media were more important in the life of various writing systems, particularly cuneiform, than the actual difficulty in learning a given system. Cuneiform was adopted with or without much modification by many languages including many languages for which it was very poorly suited. I guess I should try to bring the evidence that supports my prejudice together and do a post or two on it some time.

The Wadi-el-Hol early-alphabetic messages do tend to support a more general level of literacy among North Semitics ... at least for the military. After all, you don't write messages and expect them to be read unless there are others who can read it. (It also means that the writing system already existed before these messages were written in ca. 1900-1800 BCE. Pretty much takes alphabetic writing back into the 3rd millennium BCE.)

Once at a meeting of scholars interested in biblical translation, I emphasized the fact that there was wide spread literacy in the time of Marcus Terentius Varro (116-27 BCE), and I was met with disbelief. My information was from Varro's On Agriculture [tr H. B. Ash, LCL.165, 227, 327, 343, 391, 411]. Varro says, "On the subject of health there are many rules; these have been copied down from Mago's treatise, and I see to it that my head herdsman is reading some of them repeatedly." Note my "From Ugarit to Gades" in MAARAV 5-6 (Spring 19990) 211. Many do not accept literacy even in later times.

Rochelle,

To be sure, the alphabet is very old and many of its oldest uses seem to be by those without much or any scribal training. At least that's they way they look to me. But it sure isn't clear how widespread alphabetic literacy really was until very late in the game. To complicate matters, I think there is little doubt that the extent of professional and even common literacy waxed and waned over time. But this too was quite independent of the writing system.

Loren,

Thanks. The reference is very interesting.

Duane,
Stone scribe was a specialty; not every scribe was trained to write on stone. Have you ever tried to write directly on stone? Indeed, carve a message directly on stone without first writing it out -- like at Wadi-el-Hol? Are you aware of the fact that the writing of even the most literate person looks like the work of a semi-lit when trying to write on stone if the person is not trained to do so?

In other words, you can't come to any conclusion about the level of literacy of someone who is not trained to write on stone.

This happens to be a serious error among those who look at the funerary inscriptions on ossuaries. They classify the majority as semi-lits. Oh, there are semi-lits, but there are obvious professional scribes among them as well as many obviously literate persons. When someone has no difficulties writing on stone, it means that the writer was accustomed to writing on stone -- or pottery, for that matter.

Cultural reasons? Well, in China, to be sure. Script equals identity -- and this is still a very strong cultural reason in China. So, that's not a good analogy. The only cultural reason for the NW Semitic group would be, hey, we are relatives. As a primary reason for the choice of alphabetic over cuneiform, not likely. You are forgetting two major items: Convenience and economics.

Cuneiform is a wet surface technique and you needed to have clay around to potchke with. Also, clay is heavy, you have to keep it damp, and it takes up storage room.

The main reason for the spread of the Phoenician system is the fact that it is a dry surface technique. It was not quite as simplified as people seem to think. It was, however, extremely convenient -- you could use it on any dry surface, papyrus, skin, pottery shards, etc. -- and it was economical of both materials and time.

It's really an apples-oranges situation. You have to compare dry-surface technique to dry surface technique. Hieroglyphics was a dry surface technique. Compared to hieroglyphics, Phoenician is a snap.

Rochelle,

Perhaps my point would have been better served if I had simply said, "Writing complexity is not a mayor contributor to literacy" and let it go at that. That was the real point of my Chinese example. That was the point of my references to culture. Heck, anthropologists can't agree on want the word means. Why should any two other people? I do think that the propagation of literacy and propagation of a writing system are not necessarily related. Your point about the role of the Phoenician system's dry surface technique speaks to the propagation of alphabetic writing and not necessarily to the propagation of literacy among professionals or other non-scribes. I agree that a dry surface seems more convenient than a wet service but not if I lack a dry surface portable media just when I want to write a letter. However, I do think commerce (economics as you said) was a driving factor in the propagation of both the alphabet and non-scribal literacy. But one can say the same about the propagation of cuneiform. Commerce is a "cultural factor" rather than a complexity factor. By the way, there is evidence for literacy among some non-scribal, non-priestly, professionals at various times in ancient Egypt also. They likely wrote in Hieratic and/or Demotic scripts. But they too are very complex systems.

Ever time I hear your point about writing on stones I agree with it. I just can't seem to integrate it into my thought process. The mind being a Bayesian machine, I guess I need to hear it several more times. Don't give up on me.

I think the only place we really disagree is on what you might call "convenience" and I call "complexity." But I'm not sure that these are exactly the same think. Egyptian in any script (except Coptic) is complex but perhaps convenient when written on papyrus. While I agree that this is far from a settled issue, I think the weight of the evidence is beginning to tilt in my direction. Until I see enough evidence to build a statistical model of the extent of non-scribal literacy among those who read and wrote on clay, a model that shows that examples like the tablet that is the subject of this post are significant outliers, I will continue to think that writing systems are of little importance in determining the extent of literacy.