Aramaic on clay tablets and papyrus. The Iranian elite themselves were
not particularly defined by their facility with letters.^5 The Persians also
made other uses of writing. The Old Persian script was actually created
during the construction of the monumental inscriptions at Behistun that
proclaim a religious, ethnic, and imperial ideology in the language spoken
by the new rulers of the Near East (alongside versions in Babylonian and
Elamite). The combination of large-scale palace literacy with royal edicts
on papyrus and a monumental epigraphy strongly suggests that writing
was already accorded an innate authority per se. The Persians ruled too
over many peoples who placed slightly different authority in texts: the
priestly families of Egypt continued to monopolize knowledge of hiero-
glyphic writing; the Greek cities of Persian Asia Minor played a key role in
the creation of prose literatures on medicine, history, and philosophy; and
the Jews of Babylonia and the rebuilt city of Jerusalem alike were placing
increased emphasis on the scriptures written in exile. No simple model of
the relationship between empire and writing can adequately capture this
complexity.
At Rome too, imperial expansion coincides—to put it in neutral
terms—with an enormous increase in the complexity of writing practices.
However measured, they reached a high watermark during a long second
centuryC.E. This is true of monumental epigraphy and mundane texts.^6
(The generation of literary works is less easy to quantify, but a good case
may be made, too, for an expansion of this kind of writing in the same
period on the basis of surviving Greek literature at least, especially if
medical texts are included.) Because few of these uses can be traced
back to the origins of Roman literacy in the seventh centuryB.C.E.,^7 we
may deduce that the growth of the Roman state was accompanied—
another neutral expression—by anelaborationas well as an expansion of
writing and reading practices.
None of this proves, however, that Roman political expansion was
associated with changes in writing practices in a straightforward way.
From the Republic, there was a tradition that some forms of knowledge
were originally restricted to aristocratic priests and that the publication of
the public calendar in writing was a populist blow against their authority.
It has been suggested that the prestige sometimes attached to the order of
scribaereflects this situation.
8
Yet Rome never had anything approximat-
ing to scribal literacy on the Near Eastern model, and the story can equally
- D. M. Lewis 1994 explores this.
- On epigraphy see MacMullen 1982, discussed by Meyer 1990 and Woolf 1996
(neither account winning widespread support). For the correlation withinstrumentum
domesticumand graffiti, see Fulford 1994. Harris 1993, 9 characterizes the period in which
instrumentum domesticumwas being produced in its greatest quantities as ‘‘between the very
late Republic and the mid 3rd centuryAD.’’ - Cornell 1991 is right to note how little we know about these earliest phases.
- Purcell 2001 for both points. For the status of scribes in Etruria cf. Colonna 1976.
48 Situating Literacies