The text below is meant to be read aloud at the start of the discussion section. It compresses the week's lecture into a few minutes and hands the room to the four tasks. The fuller notes that follow are for setting each task up in turn.
This week's lecture followed a single technology across three thousand years. The oldest writing in the world is a record of beer — a ration tablet from Uruk, just after 3300 BCE. Not a hymn or a law or a story: an inventory. That is the first lesson, and it holds almost everywhere writing is invented: writing begins as an instrument of accounting and control, and stays that way for a very long time. The earliest Gilgamesh comes twelve centuries after the first tablets. A technology and the uses we eventually find for it can be separated by a thousand years.
The cognitive breakthrough that makes any of this possible is the phonetic leap — the rebus principle, using a sign for the sound of its name rather than the thing it pictures. That is what turns pictures into a system that can record speech, and it gives us a working test for what writing actually is: it must encode a specific language, have a stable set of signs, and be able to record anything a speaker can say. Hold that test steady and some scripts pass and can be read — Linear B, cracked by Ventris in 1952 because the language survived, the corpus was large, and proper names gave a way in — while others, like the Phaistos Disk, fail not because we are not clever enough but because the evidence that could decipher them no longer exists.
Then the hinge. The Mycenaean Greeks could write, but only inventories, and they lost even that when the palaces fell around 1200 BCE — writing here was a property of institutions, not individuals, so it died with them. Four silent centuries later the script returns, transformed: the Phoenician alphabet of twenty-two consonants, cheap enough to need no scribal school, to which the Greeks added the world's first systematic vowels. That small change is the centre of the week's biggest debate — Barry Powell's claim that the alphabet was adapted "for Homer," to write hexameter verse.
And cheapness had consequences the inventors never intended: public written law in place of aristocratic memory, and finally an ordinary citizen scratching a name on a potsherd to cast a vote — a civic act simply impossible in a script that takes years to learn. As we discuss, keep the master-theme in view: writing was invented for control, and became, slowly and unintendedly, a technology of citizenship. The next lecture takes up the first thing the Greeks chose to write down — not law, but song.
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Setting up the four tasks
The four tasks move along the arc the lecture traced: from what writing fundamentally is (and what can never be read), through the moment the Greek alphabet is born and the fight over what it was born for, to the two civic uses — written law and the ballot — that turned a borrowed merchant's script into the medium of a polis. Each was signalled in the lecture; the notes here mark the line between that framing and the work the groups will do. A thread runs through all four, and it is worth naming for the room: as the course develops, the tasks increasingly ask you to find and verify your own sources, and Task D makes that explicit. An AI tool is a finding aid, never an authority — everything it suggests is checked against the original.
Task AThe phonetic leap and the limits of decipherment
This is the task that builds the lecture's central definition into a working tool. Pairs first define, from Finkel's account of the rebus principle, the three conditions a system must meet to count as writing in the full sense — encoding a specific language, a stable sign-inventory, the capacity to record anything sayable — and write them down before looking at the Phaistos Disk. Then they test the Disk against those conditions, sorting what can be judged from external evidence alone (241 signs, 45 distinct, a single object, no bilingual) from what would require linguistic knowledge no one has. The decisive third stage is the one the lecture pressed: explaining why confident online "decipherments" cannot be verified — not because the problem is merely hard, but because the evidence a real decipherment needs is structurally absent. The contrast to hold up is Linear B, where a surviving language, a large corpus, and identifiable proper nouns were exactly what let Ventris in. The point to reach is the distinction between an unsolved problem and an unsolvable one.
Task BPowell's thesis — was the alphabet invented for Homer?
This task takes up the lecture's biggest open question and trains a specific intellectual discipline: state an argument at its strongest before you attack it. Groups begin with the Cup of Nestor — a hexameter joke alluding to Homer, scratched on a cheap cup in a child's grave on a colonial island within a generation of the alphabet's adoption — and ask what it assumes about its reader. They then reconstruct Powell's three premises fairly (earliest inscriptions poetic; vowels needed for scansion, not accounting; the cup as smoking gun), and only then find the weakest link. The strongest objection the lecture flagged is survival bias: pottery endures, papyrus rots, so our poetic earliest texts may show what survives, not what was written. The deeper logical question is whether the cup proves what the alphabet was invented for or only one early use of it. Behind the specific debate sits Havelock's larger claim that literacy reshapes thought, and Rosalind Thomas's warning against tidy single-inventor stories. The aim is to state what evidence, if found, would actually settle it.
Task CFrom dike to nomos — oral justice and written law
Here the argument turns political. Groups first reason in principle about how a written, public legal code changes the citizen's relation to the law — access, consistency, accountability, arguability — before reading Plutarch's Solon and Aristotle's Ath. Pol. on who opposed codification, how Solon described his achievement, and what the laws were physically inscribed on (the axones in the Agora). The sharp question the lecture set is distributive: who gains most from written law — the poorest, the hoplite middle class, or everyone equally? The comparison that keeps the argument honest is Hammurabi's stele: written public law predates Greece by a thousand years, so what is actually different here — the accessibility of the script, the audience, or the social structure? This is also where the thread runs forward to the lecture on the polis and the hoplite, where the link between a community's military basis and its political basis is taken up directly.
Task DOstraka and civic writing — mass literacy as political technology
The end of the arc, and the most ordinary object in the lecture: a name scratched on a sherd. Working from the open-access Agora archive, students examine real ostraka — uneven hands, erratic spelling, the physical trace of writing reaching below the elite — and then confront the famous puzzle of 190 ballots naming Themistocles in only fourteen hands, asking whether pre-prepared ballots undercut or merely complicate the democratic picture. The conclusion the lecture drove toward is that ostracism is structurally inconceivable without an alphabet: you cannot scratch a name in a script that takes years to learn. Thomas's caution belongs here too — scratching ten letters is "literacy" of a thin kind. The task's final stage is a genuine research exercise: use an AI tool to locate a peer-reviewed article on ostracism or Athenian literacy, then verify it exists, find it, and read it with your own judgement. The skill being trained is not AI dependence but the older discipline the tool makes faster — source evaluation and the refusal to take any claim on trust.