> From here we go to the fairly amazing leap of faith.

Yes. That is always the problem with scholars(?) who can't distinguish between a novelistic possiblity and a reasonably grounded theory.

Actually, I've always imagined the creator of Greek writing was probably a Phoenician who told some Greeks: "Here's how you do it!" It would have spread from there.

Phoenicians who learned Greek would be likely enough to create a mostly standard transcription system for Greek words and names and would probably use the Phoenican letters that could be used as vowels far more in transcribing those hard uncouth Greek words than they would in Phoenicia proper.

After all, you can't guess the vowels so well when the place names and words are foreign and where vowels are as important in word roots as consonants.

Accordingly the Greeks would not have invented writing of vowels. They would never have known anything else.

That's my novelistic hypothesis.

> > The one place where can have an idea of how ancient scripts were actually used
>
> Huh? You are, I think, under-informed. To continue:
>
> > is Mesoptamia where writing was done on soft clay -snip-
>
> seems likeliest to have hit specific types of writing in varying degrees.

Sounds reasonable.

> > Over 90% of the tablets uncovered are business documents, nostly invoices and bills of lading and such. I suspect that is in the case in every culture. Writing spreads mainly because it is such a practical way of keeping tallies and accurate records and recording day-to-day information. Sending a short written message to someone is much less costly than going oneself or sending an messenger that one trusts implicitly to pass on the message and return with the answer.
>
> Well, you can suspect it all you want, but do you have evidence?

I've encountered percentages for Mesoptamia again and again in books
and on the web but <sigh!> couldn't locate a single one when I posted.

> Thing is, we *haven't* lost all indications of what early writing was used for elsewhere. We have a decent selection of it from Egypt, for example, and not of business documents.

Ancient Egypt is mostly funerary inscriptions and temple inscriptions and such because that's was survived. I don't know the percentage of different kinds of documents found for the late periods counting only papyrus and elminating the Book of the Dead scrolls.

> We have ostraca from the Greeks, and ostraca are what furnish the data on which Powell rests his bizarre theory. Etc. As far as I know, the evidence for Greek *and* Etruscan writing, for generations after the period Powell considered most closely, is *very* consistently *against* business records. The consistency is dazzling.

That seems strange to me. Are there actually figures for this? What is published is most often the most interesting finds which generally are not business documents except business documents useful for dating or which contain some unusual feature.

> I don't claim to be an expert, but from a fair amount of miscellaneous reading on the subject, the earliest business records in (non- Mycenaean) Greek writing known to me are the names of potters' workshops written on the pots starting, if I remember right, sometime in the early 5th century BC, which is to say three centuries later than we start getting things like ostraca and epitaphs and dedicatory inscriptions at Delphi and other places.

Again, this might be in part because of what gets published most widely. I admit I don't know.

> Keep in mind that these are seriously different societies. The aristocratic ethos of archaic Greece just doesn't exist in most periods in Mesopotamia. (Note that most of the Mesopotamian business records are records of large administrations, temples or states, not of private firms.) It makes perfect sense to me that the Greeks, and for that matter the Etruscans and Iberians and Libyans and maybe Gauls too, on meeting with the much more advanced Phoenicians, would adopt writing as a sign of elite status, and therefore restrict it to elite pursuits. This kind of showing off is classic in all sorts of contexts.

Of course thses elete works are what get copied and copied and copied. No-one copies the individual invoices and bills of lading very much.

> > But religious documents and hymns and mythic poetry are a large part of the other 10%. The Bible is still consistantly the best selling book in traditionally Christian countries.
>
> Yeah, but during much of the archaic age, Homer *was* religious documents, hymns, and mythic poetry. So I'm not clear on how this does anything but undermine your objection.

Just pointing out that religious stuff (whether Homer or Sumerian hymns) does rank highest in the non-practical category. It's interesting that we have so much mythology from Greece and no law codes while the Hebrews gave us an immense book of law wrapped in historiography and saga and very little mythology. Mesopotamia gives
us both.

> > > The whole category "Romans" is problematic for me. If you were talking about, say, "Latin" mythology, and I suspect in at least one of your many posts you were, then I'd be on much less firm ground.
> > We don't have ancient Italian literature or Latin literature. We don't even have literature from Greek city states in Italy. We have only Roman literature either centered totally on Rome or reworking Greek tales even when sometimes written by outsiders like Terence or that Cisalpine Gaul Virgil.
>
> Um. Well. Let's see. We *do* have a small amount of Etruscan writing that may include at least one literary text, far as I know. (Is there now a decipherment that proves the longest text *isn't* literary?) I don't know whether the surviving inscriptions in Oscan, Umbrian, etc. offer any literary contents, though I'd certainly bet against it. As for the Greek city states? Hmmm. Pythagoras doesn't properly survive, of course. I thought there were Sicilians whose works had made it - isn't Diodorus one? But you may be distinguishing Sicily from the mainland. I thought there were at least a few writers from the mainland whose works survived, but I'm really not sure, and I wouldn't be shocked to find otherwise. Do keep in mind, though, that the mainland cities mostly fell out of Greek rule quite early.

Diodorus writes in Greek of the entire Hellenistic world. He's a general Hellenist who might as well have been Alexandrian. He writes neither as a Roman or Sicilian.

> In *general*, though, these statements strike me as true. I don't think there's any particularly regional literature in the West until the second century A.D. in Africa, at earliest. The earlier boom in writers from Spain saw them all, except I guess Quintilian,
do most of their actual writing in Rome, or in the younger Seneca's case I guess in retirement at an Italian villa too.

I suspect there was much regional and specialist Latin literature. It just didn't survive, in part because the Roman literature spread everywhere while the local literature didn't. The Roman literature was what the educated classes who spoke Latin everywhere were expected to know along with Greek literature in general.

Then the government was moved to Constantinople and things changed.

But we have Christian Latin literature and presumably many other sects would have had their own religious literature and specific localities would have had their local literature.

But it didn't get copied as much and didn't survive except for the Christian literature because of the triumph of the Christian religion.

> What I meant by "less firm ground", though, is approximately this. I feel fairly confident in saying, on the basis of a huge sample of evidence, that the Romans didn't have myths of their own on anything remotely resembling the Greek scale; that if they had myths at all that were entirely independent of Greek influence, those myths were of the patchy and fragmentary character that is, I think, actually fairly typical of most societies.

Especially societies where the literary types are too sophisticated to really believe in that sort of mythology except as allegorized. Plato and the philosophers and exotic mystery cults or even Christianity better suited their tastes for the most part ... I think ... if I'm not over-generalizing. (Which of course I am, but I don't think too
much so.)

> But I don't have any huge sample of evidence as to the Oscans, say. For all I know, they could've had an orally-transmitted, or even (still less plausibly) a written, equivalent to the -Bibliotheca- of Apollodorus, and we just didn't get it because the Oscans didn't
win. Since I think Greek-style mythology is a minority taste, I wouldn't bet that way. But the silence of Rome on this subject is a kind of evidence; the silence of the Oscans on this subject is just a black hole, not evidence at all.

Well the Nag Hammadi library appeared suddenly out of nowhere. Maybe someday an Oscan library would appear except for that wet Italian climate!

Jim Allan