Literacy and Social Fluctuation in the Mediterranean World

当我们表达自己的意思时，书面语言不能比口头语言更好地表达我们的感受。但是人类作为一种会思考的动物出现了，因为他/她可以控制自己的感觉。这种智慧的“思考”工作对字母或书面语言的诞生产生了很大的影响。因此，我们的读写能力似乎只有在我们发现如何用少量的字母（如Alphabet）来书写时才有所提高。值得注意的是，这种字母书写系统是由腓尼基人建立的，因为他们生活在迦南，位于美索不达米亚的楔形文字和埃及的象形文字之间。我们可以在线形B和希腊字母之间找到任何连续性如果我们注意到它们的音素，我们就会意识到在希腊古代社会中有它们的口头文化传统。古典社会的情况也几乎没有改变。从那以后，口头社会没有发生根本的变化。但城乡社会之间存在差异，沿海地区与内陆地区、上层阶级与下层阶级、男性与女性等差异较大。我们可以推测当时的文化水平相当高，例如，在犹太人社会，他们有自己的圣书，或者在意大利当地城市庞贝，墙上有很多涂鸦。但是，我们必须考虑到，这种猜测往往取决于我们对生活在沿海城市的男性的印象。虽然我们观察到在古代晚期和中世纪早期的文化水平稍低，但也有一些人希望通过文献的完备来提高书写技能。但是我们不能否认，识字的人越来越少。然而，自11世纪以来，出现了一种更容易阅读的文字设备的趋势，尤其是在一些商人和工匠具有较高文化水平的城市。例如，在西西里岛，我们可以看到多语言（拉丁语，希腊语和阿拉伯语）的官僚社会。很明显，书面语言使我们的“思考”密度更高，但文献的渗透并不一定会使我们的社会行为更加生动活泼。然而，我们可以看到，使用书面语言的传播是社会系统化的主导作用之一。少

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, … More 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