Literacy in the Persianate World: Writing and the Social Order
Edited by Brian Spooner and William L. Hanaway
456 pages | 6 x 9
Cloth 2012 | ISBN 978-1-934536-45-2 | $59.95 | £39.00
A volume in the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology series
Persian has been a written language since the sixth century B.C. Only Chinese, Greek, and Latin have comparable histories of literacy. Although Persian script changed—first from cuneiform to a modified Aramaic, then to Arabic—from the ninth to the nineteenth centuries it served a broader geographical area than any language in world history.
Literacy in the Persianate World offers the first comparative study of the historical role of writing in three languages including two in non-Roman scripts, over a period of two and a half millennia, providing an opportunity for reassessment of the work on literacy in English that has accumulated over the past half century. Read more . . .
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