The study of the ancient Greek and Roman world has, like every other discipline in the humanities, been transformed over the course of a generation by a host of new approaches and theoretical perspectives. Although these vary greatly in origins and nature, many share an important characteristic: they seek to denaturalize antiquity for us. That is, they try to dispel the comfortable assumption that the ancient world and its inhabitants were more or less like the modern world and like us. They aim instead to push us toward recognizing fundamental chasms between our outlook and practices and those of the...

A remarkable discovery made in the winter of 2003 gives us a most unusual opportunity to look at a body of writing that stood in a public place and, in a sense, was written on stone, but has little in common with most monumental epigraphy. This find is the graffiti of the basement level of the basilica in the agora of Smyrna, modern Izmir (fig. 1).¹ The ground level of the basilica and the east and west ends of the basement level were excavated before the Second World War by Selâhattin Kantar, then director of the Izmir Museum, and Fritz...

In chapter 1, we looked at a unique instance of the survival on a large scale of a type of everyday writing usually lost in its entirety or at best preserved only in isolated patches, the informal inscription, or graffito. I now look more broadly at the implications of archacology for our understanding of the patterns of usage of a broader category of writing, documents of everyday life in the Hellenistic world on papyrus and parchment.

Any thoughtful archaeologist can and will tell us that what comes out of the ground, even in a well-run excavation, is nothing like a...

In the previous chapter, we looked at the very lumpy character of the papyrological documentation of the Ptolemaic period. The distribution of Greek papyri and ostraca is, we have seen, radically skewed, not only in space and time but also in the means by which they survive to the present. Those means, in turn, have caused the various types of documents originally created not to survive in each period or sub-period in proportion to any reasonable estimate of their original numbers. Letters are much better represented in the middle part of the third century, mainly because of the Zenon archive,...

One of the most striking phenomena of the late antique Near Eastern world is the emergence of languages other than the dominant metropolitan tongues, Greek and Latin, as vehicles for both literary and everyday written expression. The three best-known and most important examples, often cited, are Syriac, Armenian, and Coptic, but they are by no means alone, as we shall see in chapter 5. In all of these cases we are dealing with new and deliberately created scripts as instruments intended to express spoken languages indigenous to their regions but which had found limited or no written expression during some...

In the previous chapter, we started looking at one of the most striking phenomena of the late antique Near Eastern world, the emergence of languages other than the dominant metropolitan tongues, Greek and Latin, as vehicles for both literary and everyday written expression, after a significant period in which everyday writing in this region was dominated by Greek.¹ Coptic, the example on which that chapter focused, seems to have come into being as a developed writing system in the course of the third century after earlier experiments. Apart from a single letter in a not yet fully developed form of...

Five years ago, Hélène Cuvigny and a team of collaborators published in two large volumes the results of their investigation of the road and forts between the Nile valley at Coptos and the Red Sea at Quseir, the ancient Myos Hormos.¹ Although the many hundreds of texts found in these excavations are reserved for later volumes of their own, the second volume ofLa route de Myos Hormosbegins with a long discussion of the written documents from the route. To that analysis, Cuvigny prefixed a brief section (pp. 265–67) called “une culture de l’ostracon?” In it she asked...

This book has been devoted to the remains of everyday writing in the eastern Mediterranean world during the period from Alexander the Great to the coming of Islam, with more limited attention to what preceded and followed this millennium. Those remains were inscribed on various media: papyrus, parchment, leather, pottery, stone, wood, clay, and plaster, mostly (but not always) with pen and ink. It is in a sense astonishing that any of this writing has survived. Even in a relatively dry ecosystem like that of the Mediterranean and Near East, the enemies of the survival of every form of everyday...