Pippa’s new book on writing in the Bronze Age Aegean

The last of the CREWS monographs has finally appeared in print: Pippa’s book, Exploring Writing Systems and Practices in the Bronze Age Aegean. You can read it free online with open access – follow the link below.

Download the book HERE.

The book looks mainly at the Cretan Hieroglyphic, Linear A and Linear B systems, with a little on their Cypriot cousins too. The first chapter, on script adoption, considers the nature of the adaptation of Linear A writing to represent Greek, the changes involved and the wider social and administrative context. The second, on logography, argues that the logograms (signs representing whole words or concepts) in the three main systems were used and conceptualised in very different ways.

Then the third and final chapter, on the “vitality” of writing, takes the study of endangered languages (and their writing systems) in the modern day as a starting point. Why did so many writing systems fail to survive antiquity? Does the concept of vitality, and conversely vulnerability to loss, help us to understand what happened to them? And can lessons from the ancient world help us to support and preserve modern writing traditions in danger of loss? The Aegean writing systems are used as a test case to explore these questions.

(This last chapter is also one of the underpinning pieces of research for the Endangered Writing Network, launched under Pippa’s new project, VIEWS: head over to the new website HERE for further information.)

We hope followers of the CREWS project will enjoy this final instalment, and don’t forget that all the CREWS volumes can be downloaded for free from the publications page HERE. (There are also links to the publisher pages for anyone who wants to buy hard copies, and a couple of further articles will still appear on this page in the future.)

Finally a personal note to say that Pippa is feeling very fortunate at the moment with the publication of this book, her promotion to Principal Research Associate (i.e. full professor) and – the best thing of all – the recent birth of her beautiful son Benjamin.