The poster boys of antiquity’s “capitalism” shunning money? The spread of the alphabet in the Mediterranean as a function of a credit-based, maritime trade

Abstract

Advances into the origins of monetisation in the Mediterranean have shown that even with state-controlled currency circulating, (coinage-less) credit economies existed in parallel, using written documents for transactions, well into the Roman period. The current paper documents that a credit economy facilitated the Phoenician commercial expansion in the Mediterranean (9th-7thc. BCE), becoming the vehicle by which the west Semitic abjad, the Phoenician ‘alphabet’, was rapidly adopted and adapted into various phonetic and syllabic scripts in the Mediterranean. This led to the rapid spread of literacy in societies that had been fully illiterate by then, as the Greeks, or that had never developed literacy. In contrast with previous explanations that saw the spread of literacy in the Mediterranean as a corollary to international trade, the present study postulates that literacy played a functional role within the credit economies that grew with international commerce, thereby providing the impetus for the spread of literacy, providing documentation that substantiates this hypothesis. The study links the rapid spread of literacy to the institutional role of the script within the context of monetised commercial transactions, utilizing archaeological evidence from both ends of the Mediterranean, and interpreting it within its historical context.

Silver Isotopes in Silver Suggest Phoenician Innovation in Metal Production

“…The Phoenician city-states in Lebanon and the northern shores of the southern Levant during the Iron Age (11th-6th centuries BCE), e.g., Tyre, Sidon and Byblos, 'Akko and Dor (for part of this period), shared political-economic traits and material culture (Figure 1; e.g., [7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14]). The Phoenicians are known for spreading to Europe long-lasting innovations, including the alphabet, murexbased purple dyeing and masterful craftsmanship (e.g., [7,15]). However, above all, the Phoenicians are renowned for their seafaring prowess and far-flung trade, establishing colonies in North Africa, Sardinia and Iberia (e.g., [8,[16][17][18]).…”

Societies in Transition in Early Greece

“…See Aubet (2001, 6-13) for a discussion of terminology and etymology, and Papadopoulos (1997 for the Phoenicians' underrepresentation in discussions of Greek colonization. For more recent bibliography on the Phoenicians, see Bondì et al 2009;Pappa 2013;Elayi 2018;Quinn 2018;López-Ruiz and Doak 2019. 15. But see Sass (2002) for other possible dates for the Tale of Wenamun (1075-925 BCE).…”

“…Such a situation is not implausible for the initial phases of the appearance of the alphabet, when we have only a name, a word, or a few letters. Pappa (2019) has recently linked the spread of the alphabet in the Mediterranean to the monetization of Early Iron Age economies and the use of documentation in credit-based transactions. The initial Phoenician expansion described in the previous chapter provides a plausible context for an initial proliferation of Phoenician writing on perishable materials.…”

“…The term "colonization" is still commonly used to describe these movements, even though it has long been argued that this is an unsatisfactory and misleading term (Purcell 1990, 56;Osborne 1998). Much recent work has rightly focused on the non-Greek contexts and counterparts of Greek apoikiai (e.g., van Dommelen 1998van Dommelen , 2005Hurst and Owen 2005;Hodos 2006Hodos , 2009Hodos , 2020Pappa 2013;Donnellan, Nizzo, and Burgers 2016;Lucas, Murray, and Owen 2019).…”

“…The literature on the introduction of alphabetic writing to Greece is extensive. See, most recently, Janko 2015; Papadopoulos 2016b;Clay, Malkin, and Tzifopoulos 2017;Whitley 2017;Pappa 2019;…”