Steele Philippa M., Boyes Philip J. (eds.) Writing Around the Ancient Mediterranean: Practices and Adaptations

Oxbow Books, 2022. — 272 p. — (Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing Systems 6).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.Philippa M. Steele is the Director of the Crews Project, a Senior Research Associate at the Faculty of Classics, Cambridge, and a Senior Research Fellow of Magdalene College. Having previously been awarded a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship and the Evans Pritchard Lectureship at All Souls College, Oxford, She has published widely on ancient languages and writing systems with a particular focus on Cyprus and the Aegean.Philip J. Boyes is a research associate at the Faculty of Classics, Cambridge, working on the social context of writing at Ugarit as part of The Crews Project. He has previously worked on the archaeology of the east Mediterranean and Levant in the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages.