narratives', respectively, critiques of these tales. All this has been well-known for at least a century and is critically re-examined at regular intervals, depending on the tide of intellectual vogues. There is, however, one field of enquiry, which has only received the full attention it deserves in recent years, namely, the study of written artefacts.

Written artefacts are 'natural or artificial objects with visual signs applied by humans', 3 including manuscripts and inscriptions from the first clay tablets to contemporary graffiti. While this definition emphasises the fact that written artefacts are material objects containing writing and other content, the disciplines studying them traditionally single out certain aspects. Philologists and historians, including epigraphers, have almost exclusively been interested in texts, the rare species of experts in 'auxiliary sciences', such as diplomacy, palaeography and codicology, were, by definition, relegated to the second rank, art historians were concerned with images, musicologists with musical notation, and so forth. Not only did disciplinary boundaries hamper a better understanding of written artefacts, but also a lack of knowledge about Asian, African, and American cultures and their traditions of scholarship. The last two decades have seen great advances regarding the codex cultures, 4 but moving further away from the Mediterranean and the Near East, scholarship has just begun. The following statement of the late Johan Peter Gumbert (1936-2016) concerning the need for comparison may just as well be applied to the study of written artefacts in general:

Regional codicologies are needed for the understanding of the culture's own book; but it is comparative codicology that does not only help us to understand the books for our neighbours, but also to understand our own books better -because we see what is different; we learn that things we thought self-evident were not so; we learn to ask questions that we never asked before, and we begin to understand the larger history of our book forms. 5 Looking back, one does not have to share the obsessions of post-structuralist authors in order to see that a lot of modern scholarship on written artefacts has been textual scholarship. On the one hand, this has produced the highly developed art of textual criticism with amazing results for the reconstruction and || 3 Slightly modified after a working paper of the Theory and Terminology group (TNT) of the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (CSMC) at the University of Hamburg: 'Definition of "Written Artefact"'; written artefacts produced by mechanical means, such as moveable type printing, will be neglected in what follows, similar to the field of book history that is mainly concerned with the Western printed book; for a collection of articles on 'exploring written artefacts', see Quenzer 2021. 4 One of the major achievements is certainly Bausi et al. 2015. 5 Gumbert 2014, 23.

Against this backdrop, the present volume offers eleven case studies exploring various aspects of written artefacts from the ancient world. The studies are arranged in five sections.

The first section 'Methodological Considerations' reminds us of various kinds of limitations caused by our sources, present knowledge and received traditions. Jesper Eidem and Cécile Michel draw attention to the challenges posed by the huge number of Mesopotamian clay tablets known and their uneven distribution in space and time. The authors discuss two examples from the early second millennium BCE, that are unusually rich and seemingly complete. Since it is unknown, however, how these 'archives' came about, they only provide illuminating 'flashes', but should not be used to draw far-reaching conclusions. This situation will not even be remedied by new discoveries, thus, the authors call for great caution in writing history. The random survival of written artefacts is also discussed in Jorrit Kelder's contribution. He re-examines the comparatively small corpus of Mycenaean Linear B tablets and shows that their materiality and functions have to be taken into account when attempting to understand the society that produced them. Against the paradigm that they represent palace administration, evidence from many other sources allow the author to build a strong hypothesis for an extended bureaucracy, at the same time, contradicting the image conveyed by Homer and his exegetes: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

The Egyptian, Chinese and Indian evidence is discussed in 'Early Uses of Writing'. John Baines and Cao Dazhi juxtapose Egyptian and Chinese epigraphical evidence for the emergence of writing and suggest that both in addition to everyday writing on perishable materials had a pictorial realisation of the script. While the pictorial style was soon dismissed in China, hieroglyphical writing continued to be used in Egypt for millennia. The iconic quality of the script and the importance of some key concepts such as 'life' (ankh) led to some signs' complete detachment from the words they represented and their inclusion in pictorial contexts, just as hieroglyphical inscriptions in general were only used in such contexts. In addition, the authors discuss how and in which contexts kings and elites used writing to control and display status, and for what audiences. To a certain extent, India presents a completely different case. There is