Writing from Invention to Decipherment

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.

• Silvia Ferrara, Barbara Montecchi, and Miguel Valério: IntroductionPART I: BEGINNINGS OF WRITING1: Mattia Cartolano: Cognition, iconography, and graphic communication systems on portable objects in the Near Eastern Neolithic2: Paola Demattè: The origins of Chinese writing3: Aaron J. Koller: The failure and success of the early alphabet4: Willemijn Waal: Closing the gap: writing in the Aegean from the Late Bronze Age to the Iron Age5: Alex de Voogt: The Caroline Islands Script: how one script informs five debatesPART II: THE FUTURE OF UNDECIPHERED SCRIPTS6: Ignasi-Xavier Adiego: Deciphering a writing system: luck, intuition, or method?7: Judith Weingarten: The cat in the Cretan Hieroglyphic script: ma, what it means, and where it leads8: Giorgia Baldacci: The Phaistos disk: placing an enigmatic artefact in its cultural context9: Barbara Montecchi: Design and origins of Linear A picture-based signs10: Miguel Valério: The Rongorongo 'lunar calendar' of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and the type of scriptPART III: CURRENT APPROACHES TO EARLY WRITING AND READING11: Christian M. Prager, Katja Diederichs, Antje Grothe, Nikolai Grube, Guido Krempel, Mallory Matsumoto, Tobias Mercer, Cristina Vertan, and Elisabeth Wagner: IDIOM - A digital research environment for the documentation and study of Maya hieroglyphic texts and language12: Sarah Finlayson: Looking for readers in the Bronze Age Aegean13: Louis Godart: Looking for writers in the archives of King Nestor

This is a valuable collection. The Aegean-focused chapters will perhaps be of most interest to scholars working within that field, especially those with narrow remits, butoverall, there is much to benefit a wider, varied audience. We learn that decipherments are long and ongoing processes, not sudden watersheds, and that writing is not a monolithic technology but rather a conceptual tool that can be shaped to meet many human needs in different contexts.