Literacy, Documents, and Archives in the Ancient Athenian Democracy

This article examines some trends in studies of ancient literacy, especially as they relate to the archives and inscriptions of classical Athens. While granting the symbolic significance of many ancient documents, it argues that recent studies of ancient literacy have been overly pessimistic in their assessment of the practical uses of written texts. A focus on the documents that lay behind Athenian inscriptions on stone shows that writing was used far more widely for both administrative purposes and for the preservation of official texts than the new model of ancient literacy allows.