Description
Book SynopsisThe epigraphy of 1st-millennium-BCE Italy has been studied for many years, but these studies have largely concentrated on the languages encoded in the inscriptions and their semantic meanings. This book takes a more holistic approach that looks not only at content, but also the archaeological contexts of the inscriptions and the materiality of their ''supports'': the artefacts and monuments on which the inscriptions occur.
The first writing in Italy was not a local invention, but was introduced by the Phoenicians and Greeks in the 9th8th centuries BCE. It was taken up by number of indigenous communities over the subsequent centuries to write their own languages, before these were eventually submerged by the spread of Latin.
In a series of theoretical, methodological and interpretative essays, Ruth Whitehouse explores what can be learned about how writing was used by these communities and what it meant to them. The bodies of data considered relate to Venetic an
