Rhetorical Decipherment and the Recovery of Women in the History of Ancient Rhetoric: A Note on the Bronze Age Women of Linear B Scripts

Abstract

ABSTRACT Over the last two decades, historians of ancient rhetoric have enriched and improved traditional research by extending the borders of rhetoric’s history chronologically, topically, and theoretically. Among this work, two advances stand out: advances in evidence, or what “counts” as evidence, and the recovery of the contributions of women to the history of rhetoric. Among other things, these developments have made apparent the need for developing methods of analysis, ones that offer heuristics that facilitate research in ways that conventional methods were not designed to address. This essay continues this work by introducing a heuristic called rhetorical decipherment. The authors illustrate the benefits of this method by providing a brief rhetorical analysis of pre-alphabetic scripts in Greece at Pylos that involve women. This synoptic analysis both reveals the possibility that women may have been reading and writing in Greece as early as the Bronze Age, and supports a call to use rhetorical decipherment for further, more detailed study of material artifacts.