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Writing from Invention to Decipherment contains a wealth of global scholarship on ancient writing systems from across the world. The writers dig into the foundations of writing, showcasing the complexities and varieties of scripts, from their invention to the potential decipherment of poorly understood scripts.
List of contents
- Introduction
- PART I: BEGINNINGS OF WRITING
- 1: Mattia Cartolano: Cognition, iconography, and graphic communication systems on portable objects in the Near Eastern Neolithic
- 2: Paola Demattè: The origins of Chinese writing
- 3: Aaron J. Koller: The failure and success of the early alphabet
- 4: Willemijn Waal: Closing the gap: writing in the Aegean from the Late Bronze Age to the Iron Age
- 5: Alex de Voogt: The Caroline Islands Script: how one script informs five debates
- PART II: THE FUTURE OF UNDECIPHERED SCRIPTS
- 6: 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 leads
- 8: Giorgia Baldacci: The Phaistos disk: placing an enigmatic artefact in its cultural context
- 9: Barbara Montecchi: Design and origins of Linear A picture-based signs
- 10: Miguel Valério: The Rongorongo 'lunar calendar' of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and the type of script
- PART III: CURRENT APPROACHES TO EARLY WRITING AND READING
- 11: 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 language
- 12: Sarah Finlayson: Looking for readers in the Bronze Age Aegean
- 13: Louis Godart: Looking for writers in the archives of King Nestor
Summary
Writing from Invention to Decipherment contains a wealth of global scholarship on ancient writing systems from across the world. The writers dig into the foundations of writing, showcasing the complexities and varieties of scripts, from their invention to the potential decipherment of poorly understood scripts.
