Table of Contents

1. John Bennet, Now You See It; Now You Don't! The Disappearance of the Linear A Script on Crete2. J. David Hawkins, The Disappearance of Writing Systems: Hieroglyphic Luwian3. Jeremy Black , The Obsolescence and Demise of Cuneiform Writing in Elam 4. David Brown, Increasingly Redundant: The Growing Obsolescence of the Cuneiform Script in Babylonia from 539 BC Postscript: Jerrold Cooper, Redundancy Reconsidered: Reflections on David Brown's Thesis5. Kathryn Lomas, Script Obsolescence in Ancient Italy: From Pre-Roman to Roman Writing6. Richard Salomon, Whatever Happened to Kharoṣṭhi? The Fate of a Forgotten Indic Script7. Martin Andreas Stadler, On the Demise of Egyptian Writing: Working with a Problematic Source Basis8. Claude Rilly, The Last Traces of Meroitic? A Tentative Scenario for the Disappearance of the Meroitic Script9. M. C. A. Macdonald, The Phoenix of Phoinikcia: Alphabetic Reincarnation in Arabia10. Stephen D. Houston, The Small Deaths of Maya Writing11. Elizabeth Hill Boone, The Death of Mexican Pictography12. Frank Salomon, Late Khipu Use13. Giovanni Stary, Disappearance of Writing Systems: The Manchu Case14. John Monaghan, Revelatory Scripts, 'the Unlettered Genius', and the Appearance and Disappearance of Writing 15. Chris Gosden, History without Text16. John Baines, Writing and its Multiple Disappearances

About the Author

John Baines is Professor of Egyptology at the University of Oxford. His principal publications are on Egyptian art, literature, and religion. He has also focused on the role of writing in Egyptian society and on high-cultural legitimations and concerns of elites. His publications include Visual and Written Culture in Ancient Egypt (2007) and High Culture and Experience in Ancient Egypt (in preparation for Equinox). John Bennet is Professor of Aegean Archaeology at the University of Sheffield, UK, and has received his doctorate from Cambridge University. He has held positions at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Oxford University, where he was Sinclair and Rachel Hood lecturer in Aegean Prehistory. His research interests include the archaeology of complex societies, writing and administrative systems (especially Linear B), and diachronic landscape archaeology.Stephen Houston, a specialist in Maya civilization, is Professor of Anthropology and Professor of Archaeology at Brown University. Houston has authored some 200 articles, book chapters, and reviews. The founding co-editor of Ancient Mesoamerica, he is also co-editor of a dozen technical monographs on archaeological work in Guatemala, and author or editor of twelve books, the most recent of which is The Memory of Bones: Body, Being, and Experience among the Classic Maya (with David Stuart and Karl Taube, 2006). His current research focuses on urbanism in Mesoamerica, the history of colour in the New World, Maya architecture, and the origins, development, and extinction of writing.

Reviews

The editors can be congratulated for their efforts that yielded a most valuable and highly informative overview of a largely neglected field of writing system research.
Martin Neef, TU Braunschweig, Written Language and LiteracyIt is a pioneering, fascinating and authoritative book. The 17 contributors cover a surprising range of topics in detail and with comprehensive bibliographies. ...A landmark collection of articles by scholars.
Andrew Robinson, Wolfson College, Cambridge, in NatureWhile the book is heavily slanted towards Eastern Mediterranean and Near Eastern systems, which make up the bulk of the case studies, we are, nevertheless, provided with a battery of instructive and impressive discussions of the decline of scripts. Important and indispensible contributions to the still-fledgling study of writing and can be highly recommended to all.
Gordon Whittaker, Universität Göttingen, in AntiquityEach essay is informative and stimulating; the whole collection presents studies that should stimulate further research into a comprehensive analysis into the factors involved in the disappearance of writing systems. Baines and his colleagues deserve gratitude for this significant volume.
American Journal of ArchaeologyThis is a fascinating book. It is not a final definitive treatment, but a pioneering first step, and a guide to the considerable opportunities for research, both on these writing systems and others which could not be included in this volume. The editors and contributors are to be congratulated for the success with which they have opened the discussion and pointed the way to others.
C.W. Shelmerdine, University of Texas, in Cambridge Archaeological Journal