November 21, 2024
The textual record from the southern Levant paints a picture of a complex and prolific network of cuneiform scribal communities in the late second millennium BCE. In this same period, a different community of text makers used the early alphabet in this region. Yet these early alphabetic inscriptions are limited to short inscriptions on clay vessels, or prestige objects made of refined materials. In the early first millennium BCE, there is a dramatic change in literacy practices. Cuneiform is no longer used and local variants of the alphabet are used as prestige and administrative scripts. The present paper will evaluate the evidence for the script communities represented by this diverse body of written evidence, drawing from an anthropology of craft perspective. Differences in the core practices of text making, tools, embodied practices of inscription, and the different scripts and uses of writing suggest that these two scripts were used by very different script communities with very different ways of using and learning about writing.
Alice Mandell is an Assistant Professor and the William Foxwell Albright Chair in Biblical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies at Johns Hopkins University. She works on the topics of literacy, sociolinguistics, and religion focusing on the second and first millennium BCE Levant.
Thursday, November 21 @ 5:00-6:30pm
254 Social Sciences Bldg, UC Berkeley campus
RSVP Here.
Co-sponsors: Center for Jewish Studies; Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures