2004 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary
Literacy and Social Fluctuation in the Mediterranean World
| Project/Area Number |
13301020
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (A)
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| Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
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| Section | 一般 |
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| Research Field |
History of Europe and America
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| Research Institution | The University of Tokyo |
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Principal Investigator |
MOTOMURA Ryoji The University of Tokyo, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Professor, 大学院・総合文化研究科, 教授 (40147880)
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| Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha) |
OHNUKI Tasashi The University of Tokyo, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Professor, 大学院・総合文化研究科, 教授 (90138818)
IKEGAMI Shunichi The University of Tokyo, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Professor, 大学院・総合文化研究科, 教授 (70159606)
SAKURAI Mariko The University of Tokyo, Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology, Professor, 大学院・人文社会系研究科, 教授 (90011329)
TAKAYAMA Hiroshi The University of Tokyo, Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology, Professor, 大学院・人文社会系研究科, 教授 (90226936)
NAKAMURA Yusuke The University of Tokyo, Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology, Associate Professor, 大学院・人文社会系研究科, 助教授 (60237443)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2001 – 2004
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| Keywords | Mediterranean World / Ancient Times / Medieval Times / Social History / Literacy / Oral Culture / Bureaucracy / Trade |
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| Research Abstract |
When we make ourselves understood, written language cannot express our feeling better than oral language. But human being came out as a thinking animal, because he/she can control his/her feeling. This intelligent work of ‘thinking' had given a lot of influence on the birth of letters or written language. Therefore our literacy seemed to have gone up only when we found how to write by small numbers of letters such as Alphabet. Remarkably this writing system of Alphabet was established by the Phoenicians as they lived in Canaan which was located between Mesopotamia with cuneiform and Egypt with Hieroglyph.
We can find any continuity between Linear B and Greek Alphabet in the case that we make notice of their phonemes and we realize that there was their tradition of oral culture in archaic societies of the Greeks. Things hardly changed also in Classical societies. Since then oral societies went on without basic change. But there had appeared any variations between urban and rural society,
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coastal and inland area, upper and lower class, male and female sex etc. We can guess rather high levels of literacy, for example, in Jewish society with their own sacred book or in Italian local city as Pompeii with a lot of graffiti on walls. But we must consider that this conjecture tends to depend on our impression of male people living in coastal city.
Though we observe a little less level of literacy during the period of Late Antiquity and Early Medieval Times, there were also people who hoped to promote with written skill because of thoroughgoing of documentation. But we cannot deny that there tend to decrease people who could read letters. There appeared, however, a trend of devices with more easily readable texts since 11 century, above all in cities where some merchants and craftsmen had a rather good level of literacy. For example, in Sicily, we can see multi-linguistic (Latin, Greek and Arabic) society with bureaucracy.
It is clear that written language make our density of ‘thinking' high, but penetration of documentation is not sure to lead our social behavior to be more vivid and lively. However we can see that spread of using written language is one of leading roles for systematization of society. Less
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