We typically think of slaves as being responsible for physically constructing ancient buildings, and most slaves couldn’t read. But when it came time to write on them, how much literacy was required?
No matter the culture or its writing, it takes training to painstakingly chisel such specific characters in stone, and takes longer than writing them on paper. The writing was intended to endure longer, and once begun, mistakes couldn’t be easily corrected. How much education did the masons have so they could understand what they were doing without constant supervision by a scribe? Would scribes write the template on a wall with paint, so that illiterate masons could carve over the lines without comprehension?
I’d like to hear about Egyptian hieroglyphs and Mayan writing specifically, but other examples such as Classical or Chinese would be interesting too.
As with our picture of literacy in the ancient world more broadly, this is a bit of a complicated question, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t things we can say about it. Most importantly here is that, while literacy is often presented a sort of binary (either you meet the threshold of literacy, or you don’t), there are a number of contexts that force us to look at literacy in a different way, of which epigraphy is one. Bodel suggests that there may be a “peculiarly epigraphic form of literacy that falls somewhere between reading and decoding”, and what he means by that is reading epigraphy may have allowed for a sort of navigation between reading a unique message and being able to ‘read’, even if imprecisely, well established set phrases that were commonly used in public inscriptions.
One interesting place where we can see this play out in the Classical world for professional stone-cutters is actually in one of the extant inscriptions we have advertising their services (CIL X 7296 = IG XIV 297 = CIG 5554). It’s a bilingual Greek-Latin inscription from Sicily that’s had a fair amount of ink spilled on it, not because bilingual Greek-Latin inscriptions are less common in Sicily (although they are), but because while the first four lines are perfectly correct and grammatical, the grammar of the bottom three is… unusual. Word choice and an odd use of a Greek preposition indicate that the Greek is probably a calque from the Latin and the Latin too has an odd word choice and one major oddity of case. In its original publication, the stone-cutter was believed to not be fully literate in either Greek or Latin. Georg Kaibel’s comment on it in IG XIV 297 (translation from the Latin) is that “In my opinion, the stone-cutter is neither a Greek nor Roman man, because while he wants to be understood by those who know either language, he satisfies neither”. A more recent suggestion is that the writer was actually a native Punic speaker, although the sign is in Greek and Latin, and that this explains the errors.
However, other ways of understanding the non-standard elements of the texts actually get us closer to understanding these inscriptions on their own terms. Alfödy put this inscription into dialogue with several others that mixed advertising language (if you need marble work done, etc.) with standardized set phrases a customer might want inscribed, like headstone formulas, or phrases that showed off the stone-cutter’s ability to write common epigraphic constructions (CIL VI 9556 and CIL IX 4549 in particular), and while he too looks to correct the errors of the inscription, by pairing the Sicilian sign with similar ones, he highlights the way it serves purposes besides the purely informative. But Bodel takes this a step further. He argues that one of the identified errors in the Latin actually comes not from a misunderstanding of the language but from the language of epigraphy. The unusual and, here, anomalous genitive usage was copied out of a set formulation used in public inscriptions. We know that those preparing the text of an inscription used manuals and workshop models, and it seems that what’s really going on with the bilingual sign is that the familiar formulations of public inscriptions have created a sort of literacy of their own.
Alfödy, Géza. “Epigraphische Notizen aus Italien III. Inschrieften aus Nursia (Norcia).” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 77 (1989): 155-180.
Bodel, John. “Inscriptions and Literacy.” In The Oxford Handbook of Roman Epigraphy. Edited by Christer Bruun and Jonathan Edmondson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Tribulato, Olga. “The Stone-Cutter’s Bilingual Inscription from Palermo (IG XIV 297 = CIL X 7296): A New Interpretation.” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 177 (2011): 131-140.