Anne Kolbe (ed.), LITERACY IN ANCIENT EVERYDAY LIFE

Literacy In Ancient Everyday Life results from a conference held in 2016 at the University of Zürich. The main purpose of the book is to investigate the significance of literacy throughout the ancient world, giving the most comprehensive perspective possible: a daunting task considering the many variables intrinsic to the subject. The volume offers a broad geographical and chronological frame in which the different types of writing materials and aspects of social life are contextualised and investigated; however, the focus is primarily on the Roman world. The geographical span is much wider — some might even say too wide, considering how difcult it is to compare (say) Sino-Tibetan societies to those of Pharaonic Egypt. Yet the theoretical and methodological approaches followed by the different authors and the coherent overall structure of the work make this volume useful to anyone interested in literacy