[Usyd_Classics_Events] REMINDER: USYD Classics Research Seminar Sept 15: Contexts of Early Greek Writing

[Ben Brown]

Dear Friends of Classics and Ancient History,

We are delighted to invite you to the fifth presentation of Semester 2, 2025 in our Classics and Ancient History research seminar series.

This is a special double session “Contexts of Early Greek Writing”. This session will be of wider interest to classicists, linguists, historians, archaeologists and all those interested in the sociology and technology of early alphabetic scripts in the ancient Mediterranean.

***Please note the change from the usual location***

September 15th (Monday, 12.15pm UTC+10)
School of Humanities Common Room, Rm 822 Mungo MacCallum Building

Zoom link: https://uni-sydney.zoom.us/j/83159864939

Contexts of Early Greek Writing
Nicholas J. Cowell (University of Sydney)
Qoraqo emi kylix: What Distinguishes the Epigraphy of the ‘Long Eighth Century’ ?

Olivier Mariaud (Université Grenoble Alpes)
Writing the Name of the Dead: on the alphabetisation of burial customs in Archaic Greece

Abstracts and Biography

Nicholas J. Cowell
What distinguishes the earliest Greek epigraphy – that of the ‘Long C8’ – from that of the period after the mid-seventh century BCE?
I submit that we cannot simply adopt the toolkit, skills and mindset of classical epigraphy in dealing with this material. We need to rethink the usual – proven – epigraphic paradigms in coming to grips with this early, tenuous and sometimes bewildering material.
The study of alphabetic adoption in the Iron Age has become somewhat deadlocked and intractable in recent decades, despite considerable new material.
Emerging themes in the earliest material – such as the lack of public inscriptions, the centrality of votive inscriptions, the role of ceramic artists, and the extraordinary spatial distribution of the evidence – suggest the value of a new corpus of inscriptions of the Long C8, established to align with the unique characteristics of the epigraphic material of the ‘Long C8’.

Nicholas Cowell graduated in Science and Classics at University of Melbourne in 1986 and embarked on part-time post-graduate work in Attic epigraphy and history, unfortunately discontinued in 1990. The pressure of a hectic career in banking in multiple countries led to a hiatus of over three decades – though with intervening graduate study in investments and finance and in wine – until 2024. Nicholas is now retired and pursuing research at University of Sydney in archaic Greek epigraphy, concentrating on the nature, process and timing of the adoption of the alphabet by the Greeks.

Olivier Mariaud
Why did the Greeks take almost 150 years after the adoption of the alphabet to begin to write their names on funerary monuments? This sudden bloom transformed drastically the funeraryscape and general environment of Greek burial places. To date, the inscriptions, separated from both their material and chronological frames, have been interpreted only in terms of memory, as the fossilised remains of words being said at the grave. Viewed through the lens of the anthropology of writing, however, it becomes clear that putting names on graves is neither self-sufficient nor necessary to guarantee individual or collective memory. This is the notion of the “alphabetisation of funerary space”.
By contextualising both their formula and their chronology, this talk will show that the true place of the inscribed stelai in this mutation of Archaic Greek societies lies in a political shift towards the stabilisation of rights that correlates with both the link between burial and access to resources, and with the growing use of writing in the political sphere to publicly stipulate and verify the rules that organised the first poleis.


Olivier Mariaud is Maître de conférences in Ancient History at the Université Grenoble Alpes. His 2007 doctoral thesis was entitled NECROIONIA: archaeology, space, and society. Research on necropolises and societies in Ionia during the Archaic period (700-500 BC). Most recently he has edited the 2024 volume of Gaia which looks back at the impact of NOMIMA (2 vols.) the ground-breaking collection of archaic inscriptions edited by F. Ruzé and Henri Van Effenterre. Olivier's research focuses on three interrelated topics:

  1.  Social history of pre-classical Greece: Starting with the Ionian case, but expanding to other regional Aegean or colonial spheres, I attempt to understand the functioning and evolution of the main social groups in the Greek world during the Geometric and Archaic periods through literary, archaeological, and epigraphic sources. The contextual study of discursive and ritual strategies should, in particular, provide a better understanding of the nature of these social groups that clashed and coexisted within Greek cities during the high periods. These questions have led me to explore the notion of power within poliades systems, particularly socio-economic powers.
  2.  Funeral practices: The second theme focuses more specifically on the funerary archaeology of ancient Greece. Emphasis is placed not only on the diversity of Greek practices, but also on certain essential phenomena such as the monumentalization, externalization, and literacy (the appearance of funerary inscriptions in the Archaic period) of burials. He is currently preparing several publication projects (articles, monograph) on the appearance of inscribed funerary monuments in archaic Greece. Why did the Greeks feel the need to inscribe the names of the dead on steles?
  3.  Ionia-Caria in the Mediterranean context: The third theme focuses on the history and archaeology of western Asia Minor (Ionia, Caria) during the Geometric and Archaic periods. Olivier analysed the unpublished excavation notebooks of archaeologist H. Goldman, who excavated the site of Colophon (Izmir Province, Turkey) in 1922 and 1925. These notebooks document a series of necropolises from the Late Bronze Age, the early Archaic period, and the Classical period. Currently, based on the study of several series of unpublished artifacts from the Bodrum Archaeological Museum (ancient Halicarnassus), he is exploring the nature of the social and political organization of the Carians between the end of the Bronze Age and the beginning of the Classical period, in relation to the upheavals and changes that swept across the Aegean and the eastern Mediterranean during those periods. This work forms the core of an unpublished HDR thesis currently being written.


Best, Ben
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