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Joannis Mylonopoulos, ed., Divine Images and Human Imaginations in Ancient Greece and Rome

of very good quality and rich in suggestions. The main contribution of the book is to give us an unprecedented analysis of the use of script in what we can label peripheral or marginal societies, where script was not invented but adopted from the outside (as stressed by Whitehouse, p. 96). The overall structure of the book is clear, but some inconsistencies nevertheless emerge. The content is, at the same time, more and less wide-ranging than the title would suggest. Mesopotamia and Egypt appear in the first section (but Saitic Egypt cannot be considered as an ‘antecedent’), Central Europe and Britain in the third. On the other hand, the ‘Mediterranean’ of the title is in fact the first millennium BC Mediterranean (Minoan Crete is present as an ‘antecedent’). PreRoman Italy dominates with the exception of Greece, while scripts of other Mediterranean regions are missing. Southern France or Spain are only touched upon by Häussler, Cypriot syllabic by Lomas. The Phoenician and Punic experiences are conspicuously absent, and Etruscan, Latin or Greek are only quoted as a background to the local scripts of Italy. These absences create a heavily biased perspective. Beyond Mesopotamia and Egypt, even a cursory survey of those societies which in some way reinvented writing at the beginning of the first millennium BC could give us a better comprehension of the role of script in the early Mediterranean. From this point of view, the book fails in providing the reader with what the title promises: a survey of the ‘many’ possible connections between writing and state in the first millennium Mediterranean. It is completely successful, instead, in demonstrating that writing can be used in very different ways in different societies. It is still more successful in demonstrating the importance of a deeper understanding of literacy in the early Mediterranean world – something that cannot be simply understood as the counterpart of orality – in what we can label a view from the bottom, a view that can only be recovered through an interdisciplinary approach where archaeology is not playing a secondary role.