Some missing links in my efforts to trace continuities as well as discontinuities in Minoan-Mycenaean scribal practices

Abstract

The picture I show here, which is a photograph of a legal document composed in the Aramaic language and written on papyrus, illustrates a point I hope to make on the occasion of an event planned for the future. The event, organized by Giulia Sissa, will take place in the spring of 2020 at the Johns Hopkins University. Papers written in honor of Marcel Detienne will be presented—papers meant to be relevant to his lasting intellectual legacy. The paper I plan to present will address part of that legacy, centering on insights achieved by my friend Marcel in his investigations of ancient Greek alphabetic writing as it evolved in the first millennium BCE. And the point that I hope to make is specifically relevant to Marcel’s insights as elaborated in an essay he wrote for a book that he edited, Detienne 1988, about the diversity of scribal practices involved in ancient Greek uses of alphabetic writing. My point is, such diversity is due in part to continuities as well as discontinuities in scribal practices stemming from the Minoan-Mycenaean world of the second millennium BCE. To make this point, I will need to focus on non-Greek as well as Greek examples showing continuities in scribal practices attested throughout the Mediterranean world and beyond—not only in the second millennium BCE but also in the later first millennium. A case in point is the picture I show for this posting: the papyrus here, found in Elephantine, Egypt, and dating back to the fifth century BCE, is a folded and sealed document that is addressed, in a way, “to whom it may concern,” that is, to any authorized person who may need to unseal and unfold the authorized document and then read its content, written by or on behalf of those who originated this content.