Agency in Ancient Writing

Epilogue: Agency and Writing

249 Epilogue: Agency and Writing Ruth D. Whitehouse I take it as my brief in this epilogue to pick out issues that I find particularly interesting and to make some suggestions for future research. I make no apology therefore for concentrating on my own interests and also for introducing examples that come from my own research field, first-millennium BC Italy, which is not covered by any of the chapters in the volume. I shall focus specifically on different ways in which agency relates to writing, both as a general theme and as treated in the chapters in this volume. I shall avoid a general discussion of agency and of the various approaches to its study in archaeology, although some aspects will be touched on in the course of my account. There are at least three different ways in which agency relates to writing, each of which can be further subdivided: agency can be revealed in written documents, agency can be involved in producing written documents , and, finally, there is the agency of writing itself. AGeNCY ReVeaLeD IN WrITTeN DOCUMeNTS This refers to information about agency in society that is revealed through texts, as in the third section of this volume. Nakassis’s chapter, DOI: 10.5876/9781607321996.c11 250 Ruth D. Whitehouse which discusses the roles of named individuals in Mycenaean Greece, provides a particularly good example. This kind of study, which is fundamentally the same as that carried out by historians in better textually served eras, is of course valuable, because it allows us access to information about the lives and activities of individuals normally inaccessible to archaeologists. However, it is less about writing than are the other types of agency discussed here. The kind of information gained does not intrinsically depend on the written form but is of types that could in different circumstances be obtained from other sources: in the case of present-day societies, for instance, from oral information or observations of behavior. For this reason, I shall not discuss it further here; instead, I shall concentrate on the other two types of agency in which writing is central. AGeNCY INVOLVeD IN PrODUCING WrITING This type of agency is one of the major concerns of the current book, with some chapters devoted to agency in the emergence and development of early writing systems and others concerned with the production of specific inscribed artifacts or categories of artifacts. Studies of agency of this type can usefully be subdivided into three: those concerned with the development of entire writing systems, those concerned with specific artifacts but concentrating on the origination of the writing content , and those concerned with the production of the inscribed artifact. All of these are valid and interesting, but they involve rather different types of research, albeit linked by the concept of “agency.” Studies of the first type tend toward the abstract and concentrate on cognitive and linguistic issues, with materiality relegated to a subsidiary role or absent altogether. The chapter by Smith in this volume is a good example, referring to writing systems in general rather than any particular system (although Chinese is used as an example). The abstract concepts employed by Smith include “visual object recognition” and “repetitious intensification,” discussed as general phenomena independent of any specific context, historical, archaeological, or material. As Englehardt and Nakassis argue in the Introduction, this can be regarded as agency in the structurationist sense, but I wonder whether this usage stretches the term too far. Does a term—“agent”—that can embrace named individuals at one end of the definitional spectrum and abstract nouns at the other really have any utility? The other two categories both relate to specific inscribed artifacts, one to the content of the inscription, the other to the artifact itself. The agency involved may overlap or even be the same in some cases, but more often would be different . The societies that produced early writing were all hierarchically organized (characterized in traditional terms as high-level chiefdoms or states) and writing was the concern of either the elite proper (royalty/aristocracy) or the authorities responsible for running the state bureaucracy, who usually occupied respected 251 Epilogue: Agency and Writing if not top positions in the hierarchy. In terms of the writing, the bureaucrats, or some of them, were certainly practitioners, but the members of the elite proper may not have been. In terms of the inscribed artifact, it is unlikely...