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 presents a group of papers 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. They focus 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.

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: approaches to the study of writing, and the development of the CREWS project
• 2. What is an alphabet good for?
• 3. The ‘death’ of alphabets at the end of the Bronze Age: how does the Deir ʿAlla alphabet fit the picture?
• 4. Cypro-Minoan and its potmarks and vessel inscriptions as challenges to Aegean Scripts corpora
• 5. Ductus in Cypro-Minoan writing: definition, purpose and distribution of stroke types
• 6. The magic of writing in the Late Bronze Age East Mediterranean
• 7. Relations between script, writing material and layout: the case of the Anatolian Hieroglyphs
• 8. The rare letters of the Phrygian alphabet revisited
• 9. Measuring particularity and similarity in Archaic Greek alphabets with NLP
• 10. The introduction of the Greek alphabet in Cyprus: a case study in material culture
• 11. Word-level punctuation in Latin and Greek inscriptions from Sicily of the Imperial period
• 12. Speculative Syllabic
• Bibliography