A Monograph on Literacy in Canaan in the Late Bronze Age

FAIN: FA-12132-78

Aaron Demsky
Unaffiliated independent scholar

This monograph would examine how the written word influenced groups or individuals who could read and write and to what extent the written heritage reached the illiterate populace in Canaan in the Late Bronze Age. Among the issues raised will be: (l) the relationship between the various writing systems; (2) the nature of scribal education; (3) the oral residue in literate culture found in Canaanite poetry, proverb and epistolary; (4) the distribution of alphabetic writing; (5) the factors which inhibited the diffusion of the alphabet until the Late Bronze Age; and (6) the implications of the alphabet as a medium for new political and religious values.