Classical Literacy

Variations of Literacy and the Alphabet

In Greece and southern Italy, variants of the alphabet were used during the Classical period.  With the exception of early indigenous writing in Crete, all were derived from scripts in the ancient Near East and dispersed by the Phoenicians along their trade routes.  In Greece literacy was a requirement for citizenship and its rights, however it is still debated whether or not Greek writing caused the advent of this form of democratic government.  These early scripts consisted of only uppercase letters and the format of writing was varied, including orientation of the writing, reading direction, and word spacing had not been fixed yet.  One of the most significant modifications made by he Greeks to the alphabet was the addition of vowels.  These vowels provided considerable flexibility in adapting the script to a wide range of tongues.  Perhaps it was this addition that made it easier to read than its predecessors.

1. The Greek alphabet and how it is written.

The Function of Graphic Codes

Writing had served many purposes in Egyptian, Babylonian, and Canaanite cultures.  Legal and literary texts, business records accounts, official decrees, ritual prayers, and expressive graffiti had been developed.  Tablets and scrolls remained the basic portable media, while stone carving indicated site-specific and official text.  When writing functioned as a form of personal expression in a letter or graffiti, it usually took the form of a cursive script that was gestural and informal.  Commemorative statements on funeral steles, tributes celebrating victory, and inscriptions marking other civic occasions took on considerable gravity when carved in the most elegant majuscules.

Models of Writing: Gestural and Constructed

The use of models for lettering was essential to the development of a culture of literacy.  Scribes relied on models to help train their hands to render the specific shapes.  Such knowledge became somatic and gestural patters of production became habitual.  Cursive writing can be rapidly produced handwritten versions of the alphabet.  This type of writing was rarely used for important or monumental documents.  However, the purpose of cursive was to produce texts that were legible and efficient, rather than something that based on aesthetic forms.

2. Early Roman cursive writing.

Glossary

Constructed forms - letters made up of drawn parts, often with the aid of a mechanical device, such as a compass or straight-edge, often according to mathematically calculated ideals of proportion and distinguished from letterforms that bear the trace of a (continuous) hand gesture.

Cursive - a script with rounded, looped forms, often with letters joined within words and made by hand in a continuous motion without raising the writing instrument from the paper or breaking letters into individual strokes.

Gestural - pertaining to movements of a hand, limb, or other part of the human body.

Majuscules - upper case letters.

Minuscules - lower case letters

Mono-line - type or writing in which ascenders and descenders are the same height as the body of the letters.

Ostraca -plural of the Greek ostracon (shard), fragments of pottery or stone used as writing surfaces.

Uncial - from the Latin uncia (inch), rounded letterforms in which ascenders and descenders extend slightly beyond the x-height and baseline (beyond the lines used as guides for the height of the body).