ABSTRACT
This chapter is divided into three sections: Time-Keeping; How to Select: Sortition vs. Election; and Writing and Communication. The texts in the first section make plain the importance of time to humans: crops need to be planted and harvested, and animals move or need to be moved at specific times of the year. This “rural time-reckoning”, observable through changes in the seasons, eventually led to lunar and solar calendars and subsequently to a desire for more precise “urban timing” for religious, economic, social, and political reasons – hence the introduction of instruments to measure time. When it became important to divide the day and night into units of time, instruments began to play a major role in time measurement. The various types of sundials that divided daytime into appropriate units were useless at night. This drawback stimulated the invention and development of the water clock (clepsydra), which, in various iterations, seems to be the forerunner of the modern mechanical clock and alarm clock. The second section focuses on the use of technology in the context of political procedures. In the Greek and Roman worlds, selection of individuals for public offices required sortition/allotment and election. Sortition introduced randomness to the selection process and became a favourite method of appointment for many offices in the Athenian democracy where all citizens were regarded, ideally, as equally fit and equally responsible for civic duties. At the same time, however, voting with ballots was used in some cases to ensure a quorum, and eventually the latter method became more important with the introduction of secret ballots to safeguard the proper selection of officials. Several newly developed devices ensured proper procedure: the seal-stone, the kleroterion and pinakion, special disc-ballots and ostraca, and bridges to isolate the voter from observation. The third section presents texts regarding the technology of writing. More than any other technology, written language makes civilisation possible, since written records transcend time and space, enable the accumulation of knowledge, and stimulate intellectual activity. Some modern scripts are based on the Greek alphabet, which appeared in the eighth century bc, and that was relatively easy to learn and use. Earlier, complicated Bronze Age scripts had fallen out of use and were forgotten. The small number of symbols of the Greek alphabet probably promoted literacy among most levels of society (Bowman and Woolf 1994, Beard 1991, Harris 1989), but access to written materials was limited in antiquity, since the costs of handwritten works limited the number of copies in circulation so much that most volumes would be beyond the resources of most people. At the same time, education in writing is amply attested for part of the population at least since they used wax tablets for practice and had access to papyrus, parchment, and inks for writing. Papyri from Egypt give some sense that “ordinary” people wrote and read, but for the average citizen, reading of “literature” was probably limited to inscriptions engraved in wood, metal, and especially stone, of laws and decrees set up in the agora or forum, and to the volumes in public libraries.
