Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix Maps xiv Preface xv Chronology xvii Introduction: A Difficult Topic, Little Studied, Poorly Understood 1 1 What Is Writing? 11 2 Writing with Signs 19 3 Categories and Features of Writing 38 4 Some General Issues in the Study of Writing 51 5 Protocuneiform and Counting Tokens 60 6 Origin of Lexigraphic Writing in Mesopotamia 70 7 Plato's Ideas and Champollion's Decipherment of the Egyptian Hieroglyphs 85 8 Egyptian Writing and Egyptian Speech 100 9 The Origin and Nature of Egyptian Writing 108 10 "The House of Life": Scribes and Writing in Ancient Egypt 120 11 Syllabic Scripts of the Aegean 128 12 The West Semitic Revolution 148 13 What Kind of Writing Was West Semitic? 163 14 The Origins of West Semitic Writing 175 15 Chinese Logography 187 16 Lexigraphic Writing in Mesoamerica 206 17 The Greek Alphabet: A Writing That Changed the World 227 18 Summary and Conclusions 245 Glossary 255 Bibliography 263 Index 270

About the Author

Barry B. Powell is Halls-Bascom Professor Emeritus of Classics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has written extensively on ancient Greek literature and the history of writing. His books include Homer and the Origin of the Greek Alphabet (1991), A New Companion to Homer (editor, with Ian Morris) (1997), Writing and the Origins of Greek Literature (2001), and two editions of Homer (second edition, Blackwell, 2007).