Writing from Invention to Decipherment

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Writing from Invention to Decipherment contains a wealth of global scholarship on ancient writing systems from China, Mesopotamia, Central America, and the Mediterranean, to more recent newly created scripts such as the Rongorongo from Easter Island, the Caroline Island scripts, as well as the alphabet. The aim is to dig into the foundations of writing, showcasing the complexities and varieties of scripts, from their invention to the potential decipherment of poorly understood scripts. The volume offers state-of-the-art research on undeciphered scripts from the Aegean (as for example, Cretan Hieroglyphic and Linear A) or not completely deciphered (as for example Maya) scripts. From a methodological perspective, these contributions lay out how and why writing was invented, who used it, and to what ends. Here writing is presented as a multi-modal cultural phenomenon, that intersects and transcends neat discipline boundaries, within an inclusive approach bridging archaeology, linguistics, epigraphy, and cognitive studies.

1 - Cognition, iconography, and graphic communication systems on portable objects in the Near Eastern Neolithic
2 - The origins of Chinese writing
3 - The failure and success of the early alphabet
4 - Closing the gap: writing in the Aegean from the Late Bronze Age to the Iron Age
5 - The Caroline Islands Script: how one script informs five debates
6 - Deciphering a writing system: luck, intuition, or method?
7 - The cat in the Cretan Hieroglyphic script: ma, what it means, and where it leads
8 - The Phaistos disk: placing an enigmatic artefact in its cultural context
9 - Design and origins of Linear A picture-based signs
10 - The Rongorongo 'lunar calendar' of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and the type of script
11 - IDIOM - A digital research environment for the documentation and study of Maya hieroglyphic texts and language
12 - Looking for readers in the Bronze Age Aegean
13 - Looking for writers in the archives of King Nestor

Silvia Ferrara is Professor of Philology and Civilizations of the Aegean and Pre-Classical Mediterranean at the University of Bologna and PI of the ERC Consolidator Grant INSCRIBE Invention of Scripts and their Beginnings. Barbara Montecchi specialized in Aegean Archaeology at the Italian Archaeological School at Athens and then earned a PhD in History and Archaeology of the Ancient World from the University of Florence. She was Assistant Professor and INSCRIBE team member at the University of Bologna from 2019 to 2022. Currently, she works for the Museums of the University of Florence, dealing with museum communication, accessibility, and public engagement. Miguel Valério is a María Zambrano postdoctoral researcher at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Department of Prehistory). He was trained in Archaeology and earned a PhD in 'Languages and Cultures of the Ancient World and their Survival' at the University of Barcelona. His primary academic activities and publications focus on the archaeology of early state societies, the origins of writing, and undeciphered scripts.