Literacy and Writing Systems in the Aegean Bronze Age

Introduction

Anthropologists and archaeologists describe certain societies as "Iron Age" or "Bronze Age," recognizing that the properties of the main metal used by a society's technology greatly affect both its use and, through it, the nature of that society. For instance, bronze — unlike iron — is too soft to be used for ploughing; it is an alloy. Bronze can be smelted at lower temperatures than iron, which requires specialized supplies of charcoal. All these facts affect the societies that use bronze and iron. Since bronze cannot be used for ploughing, bronze-using societies cannot produce the large agricultural surpluses that iron-using societies can in many regions; and since bronze requires tin, Bronze Age societies were compelled to trade. (Claiborne, 1974) The same parallel, I argue, exists between the different characteristics of different writing systems and their use as communication technologies within a society.

The Bronze Age is one of the great eras of our European past — a time of change and innovation on the threshold of history. It lasted from about 3000 BC to 500 BC, a period that saw the widespread adoption of bronze metallurgy across Europe. This was not merely an age of technological progress; it also witnessed important developments in the way society was organized, in the daily lives of ordinary people, in religious beliefs, and in artistic expression. Literacy played a large part in this changing society and in the roles people played within it. (Cline, 1994)

Literacy is always culturally progressive, with increasing literacy making a society more "modern." (Gelb, 1974) Literacy also interacts with society by improving the technology of communication and information preservation. One of its main impacts is on the nature and existence of power relations. Texts are an integral means by which power in literate societies is delegated to elites. This text-based delegation of power grants many groups — both in the ancient and modern worlds — political and social prestige and privileges over others. There are two means by which power is delegated through texts: first, through the authority legitimately gained from the function of communicating and preserving information, arguments, and ideas; and second, through an illegitimate delegation of power in which the medium of writing itself commands deferential respect from those who cannot penetrate it. (Schmandt-Besserat, 1992)

Literacy and Society

Writing constructs forms of authority absent in societies without writing. It enables a group of people to do something done less easily in an oral society — gain a monopoly on understanding the ideas, narratives, and texts vital to that society. When these are written down, only those who can read can have full knowledge of them, and this restriction gives readers a privileged position from which to interpret them. This translates directly into power. As Gellner (1998) puts it, "a delimited set of divinely uttered propositions … is socially sustained by the social classes which have privileged access to it through literacy, and an interest in invoking its legitimacy against such groups as would threaten it, and which can elaborate and uphold a corpus of interpretations and applications of the initial set of revealed assertions." This delineation of power was certainly true in the Aegean Bronze Age: people and society were separated by literacy. Literacy meant power, and those who possessed it knew it.

Sometime shortly before 750 BC, the Greeks developed the alphabet. Greek mythological tradition ascribes this development to a borrowing from the Phoenicians (Canaanites), and this appears to be essentially true. Semites in Egypt had developed an "acrophonic" alphabet based on hieroglyphic signs, in which each sound was represented by the picture of an object beginning with that sound. By 1200 BC this had become a linear script. The new alphabet had only 27 characters — a huge improvement over the cumbersome hieroglyphic and cuneiform writing systems. (Hankey, 1993) This system spread to the eastern coast of the Mediterranean. But like hieroglyphics, it represented only consonants. The Greeks took this system and used some of the signs for Semitic consonants that did not appear in the Greek language to represent vowels. The Romans obtained their alphabet from a variant Greek alphabet, and we use the Roman alphabet today. The earliest surviving inscriptions are poems carved on pottery. Semitic scholars claim that the Semitic forms most similar to those borrowed by the Greeks date to approximately 1200–1050 BC. (Schmandt-Besserat, 1992)

In 1952, great light was thrown on the literacy of early civilization by the decipherment of an ancient writing on clay tablets known as Linear B. Michael Ventris, a young English architect, accomplished the task on which scholars had labored for fifty years. (Cline, 1992) These tablets were among some 2,000 uncovered at Knossos on Crete by Arthur Evans. With them were tablets in an older writing that Evans called Linear A, and some still older hieroglyphics. Both Linear A and Linear B are forms of writing in which symbols represent syllables. In 1939, approximately 600 more tablets in Linear B were found at Pylos on the Greek mainland, and in 1952 and 1953 further examples were discovered at Mycenae. (Powell, 1991)

Writing Systems of the Aegean

Ventris found that Linear B is an archaic Greek dialect — the oldest Indo-European writing system yet discovered. The language is at a stage some 700 years older than the earliest classical Greek. The tablets appeared at Knossos because the Mycenaeans had earlier conquered the Minoans. The tablets are merely inventories of palace storerooms and arsenals; yet they reveal a great deal about the Mycenaeans. They engaged in agriculture, industry, commerce, and war. A king headed society, with a "leader of the people" — perhaps an army commander — beneath him. There were landowners, tenant farmers, servants and slaves, priests and priestesses, and many trades and professions. The Mycenaeans worshipped Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Ares, Artemis, Athena, and the other gods of Mount Olympus. (Hankey, 1993)

The language of Linear A has not yet been deciphered. It was in use on Crete from about 1700 BC to 1600 BC as a replacement for an earlier hieroglyphic writing system possibly adopted from the Egyptians. Around 1100 BC, Greece was overrun by an invasion of tribes from the north. The Dorians, and later the Ionians, occupied the areas where Minoan-Mycenaean cultures had flourished. Greece would not be so rich or powerful again until the golden age of Athens under Pericles in the 5th century BC. (Schmandt-Besserat, 1992)

This system of writing developed on the island of Crete and in continental Greece during the Bronze Age. (Cline, 1992) It represented the famous Cretan and Mycenaean cultures of the eastern Mediterranean, which preceded the culture of classical Greece. There were in fact two main stages in the development of the Cretan script: pictographic and syllabic. The pictograms — or hieroglyphs — were used in the Middle Minoan period (2100–1700 BC) and are divided into two variants: the Early form, used mainly on seals, and the Late form, which appears in inscriptions on tablets. Approximately 150 pictographic inscriptions have been found in all; they depict people, animals, and plants, and were written either from right to left or left to right. (Hankey, 1993)

Pictograms are difficult to decipher; they are thought to have denoted not only words but also symbols and determinatives, with some signs possibly functioning as syllables. This script's origins can be traced to Egypt, as the shape of the pictograms sometimes resembles Egyptian hieroglyphics. (Hankey, 1993)

The Linear A script appeared in the Middle Minoan period (1700–1550 BC). It is a syllabic script that used a limited number of symbols and is therefore easier to study. Found on seals, instruments, and tablets on the islands of Crete, Thera, and Melos, the script comprises between 77 and 100 symbols, each denoting a syllable. The language it represents remains unknown, but it is certainly non-Indo-European and may be classed among the "Mediterranean" languages. This language made no distinction between long and short vowels, between voiced and voiceless consonants, or between l and r.

Linear A served as the basis for the development of Linear B, which emerged on Crete around 1450 BC and soon spread to continental Greece, where large archives of Linear B documents were excavated at Pylos and Mycenae. Linear B — the first script adopted by Indo-Europeans — became a part of Mycenaean culture, the first civilization of continental Europe. It was written in both Greek and the indigenous languages of Crete and other Aegean islands. The Linear B script contained 88 syllabic signs and several determinative symbols (logograms). (Schmandt-Besserat, 1992)

Because it was borrowed from non-Indo-European speakers, Linear B was not ideally suited to the Greek language. It did not reflect many important phonetic features of the tongue and could not, for example, end a word in -s or any other consonant. Nevertheless, the script was in wide use in Greek city-states such as Pylos, Tiryns, and Mycenae, and a great number of economic documents were written in it. After 1200 BC, when Doric tribes from the north invaded Greece, the Mycenaean civilization fell and its advances were forgotten. Interestingly, the Greeks retained a kind of unease about the old script — perhaps because it was psychologically associated with royal scribes and tax collectors. Five centuries later, the Greeks developed their own alphabet. (Schmandt-Besserat, 1992)

Conclusion

The conclusions that can be drawn from the decipherment are valuable for understanding the history of the Mediterranean region. Linear B as we know it today was used for an accounting system specifying commodities and the wealth held by the palace. The clay tablets were never deliberately baked unless they happened to be in an area of the palace that caught fire. Dates were mentioned only in relative terms — "last year" or "this year" — and it is assumed that tablets were scraped and reused annually. We may conclude that Linear B was not suited to literary or historical writing. Further archaeological investigation has failed to produce any diplomatic correspondence, treaties, or literary or religious texts. It appears that Linear B served solely as a means of record-keeping. (Millard, 1998)

Clearly, we can see the parallels between writing and society, just as we can understand why this period was coined the Bronze Age. Literacy was, in a sense, nothing more than the sum of the society that produced it. Everything written in that time depicted the age and condition of society as a whole. The scripts tell us that those who were literate were in a position of power, and those who were not were in a position to follow. Yet overall, the period of the 8th–7th centuries BC saw literacy becoming more widespread. Some would still remain illiterate and others would have had only a basic grasp of writing, but due to the alphabet's simplicity compared with earlier scripts, it could be understood by a wider range of people. The written word became important for Greek society as a tool for record-keeping, for preserving the past, and for facilitating trade. Finally, individual craftsmen's signatures began to appear on artifacts as artisans took pride in their work and, like other individuals during the rise of the Greek polis, sought to assert their own identity.