The Phoenician Script of the Tel Zayit Abecedary and Putative Evidence for Israelite Literacy

Abstract

The definition of literacy for antiquity (and modernity) is the subject of substantial debate. Some suggest that in “oral cultures” the capacity to use language (that is, the spoken word) in a functional or sophisticated manner constitutes literacy. However, some wish to argue that literacy is a term that is to be understood as referring to the ability to read and write texts. Occasionally, there are those who propose that functional literacy be defined as just the capacity to write one’s name. The United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has produced the following minimalist definition for the contemporary period: “Literacy is the ability to read and write with understanding a simple statement related to one’s daily life. It involves a continuum of reading and writing skills, and often includes also basic arithmetic skills (numeracy).”1 The bibliography for the subject of literacy in antiquity (and modernity) is vast and varied.2 For the southern Levant during antiquity, (1) I propose the following as a working description of literacy: substantial facility in a writing system, that is, the ability to write and read, using and understanding a standard script, a standard orthography, a standard numeric system, conventional formatting and terminology, and with minimal errors (of composition or comprehension). Moreover, I maintain that the capacity to scrawl one’s name on a contract, but without the ability to write or read anything else

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 7 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.