Ancient Literacies

(Marvins-Underground-K-12) #1

Though it is unique, and extremely puzzling to us, it is not actually


a complicated text. Although we need careful decipherment, it must have


been obvious for the writer. The writing is confident and neat, the layout


pretty clear. There is a system here, even a system of punctuation, and the


added notation of ‘‘E’’ (the editor suggests this signaled a completed


transaction). It is well organized and looks like a text written by someone


who knows what he is doing (is it, for instance, his own system of punc-


tuation?). As for its date, c. 350B.C., it is much later than the ostraka we


looked at earlier, and we cannot read this system back 100 years earlier or


even more. But this may be a glimpse into the mundane ‘‘functional’’


literacy of a commercial kind in Athens of the high classical period; this


may be a rare example of a type of list literacy that was used and usable in a


commercial establishment of slaves, or leasing of slaves. It is exceptionally


functional and easily legible: no continuous prose, no words running on


without word division, no problem working out names and numbers.
38


One can perhaps wonder if much of the day-to-day literacy—if it existed—


of traders, bankers, potters, small-manufacturing establishments, looked


somewhat like this by the mid-fourth century.


LISTS AND LEGIBILITY IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE: THE CITIZEN


This brings us to the list in the public sphere and back to Athens. I would


like to emphasize the list as a separate type of writing and writing use that


is relevant to public documents as well as private, and ‘‘list literacy’’ as an


interesting subcategory of literacy use. Lists are interesting for our pur-


poses for several reasons. They have been said to be a quite separate


entity from oral communication (Goody [1977] argued that the list was


a quintessentially literate artifact, not a naturally occurring phenomenon


in an entirely oral society, though early Greek poetry is not entirely


unable to give lists of names). Lists on stone are very common indeed in


classical Athens. They are usually—but not always—set out in list form,


names one below another rather than continuously along the same


line, and therefore they are exceptionally clear and easy to read (see,


for instance, the First Stele from the Athenian Tribute Lists, figure 2.8b,


and the fragment from the list of 440/439, figure 2.8a). In the Greek


writing system the list is unusual in not having words running on con-


tinuously: there would be no difficulty separating words. If Saenger is


right about the connection of silent reading with separated words,
39
lists



  1. It is interesting, as Threatte points out (1980, 74ff., esp. 82) that punctuation and
    interpuncts were apparently seen as especially useful for setting off numerals even in public
    texts, which usually avoided them.

  2. Saenger 1997.


30 Situating Literacies

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