Below you can see Hymettos in the distance, as seen from the Acropolis in the very centre of Athens. Its main peak is in view towards the left side of the picture, but you would be forgiven for thinking that it doesn’t stand out very much from the rest of the mountain. Nevertheless, that peak was home to an important sanctuary to Zeus, where the largest collection of early Greek alphabetic inscriptions has been found. We don’t have any surviving Greek alphabetic inscriptions that date earlier than the second half of the 8th century BCE, while these examples from Mount Hymettos date to the mid 7th century BCE – some 200 years before Classical Greek writers like Plato or Euripides. Out of around 700 inscriptions dated to the 8th-7th centuries BCE, a massive 150 come from the Hymettos sanctuary, almost all inscribed on ceramic cups.

The Greek writer Pausanias tells us that there was an altar to Zeus Ombrios, literally Zeus of the Rain, on the mountain. That makes sense because Hymettos acts as a weather vain for the city, an indicator of what is to come. The inscriptions from the sanctuary don’t mention Zeus Ombrios though, they refer to Zeus Semios: Zeus of the Sign. One of the things I am very interested in in my research at the moment is the concept of the sema (the word from which Semios derives) in this period. It is possible that there was an early link between the word sema and the letters of the alphabet – which is actually something I’ve recreated in Lego before, focusing on the only reference to writing in the Iliad, where the word sema is specifically used.

The inscribed cups have three distinct features that suggest that writing was an important act for the activities from the sanctuary:

1. The mention of Zeus Semios
2. Several examples of inscribed alphabetic sequences (ΑΒΓΔΕ… etc)
3. Several inscriptions that specify “X wrote this” or similar.

My suspicion is that writing actually took place as part of the ritual activities at the sanctuary. This could help to explain why seemingly low value ceramic cups were considered worthy offerings to Zeus – it was not the object but the writing it bore that was the most important part of the dedication.

The sanctuary of Zeus Semios is not the only place where people have performed the act of writing on Mount Hymettos – far from it – and the article I linked to at the beginning of the post turned into something of a homage to writing on the mountain from the 7th century BCE to the present day. There are plenty of caves and rocky outcrops that have attracted graffiti ancient and modern – one of which (the one with the earliest evidence of human habitation in fact) is the Liontari Cave, where a fearsome lion is said to have lived, using it as a base to terrorise the surrounding area. He looks quite tame to me though!

Some of the more recent writings on the mountain have been made by visitors who go there to hike or see the wildlife (it’s a popular escape from the city for Athenians, as well as a tourist location). I particularly love the colourful signs from the botanical trail, naming plant species for curious viewers, though I didn’t manage to recreate those in Duplo.

Campers are probably safe from the legendary lion, but you never know…

One interesting trend is that writing is often found in settings that are associated with religious or ritual practice. There are numerous monasteries, for instance, which would have been important sites for producing and disseminating the written word. The earliest known Christian building, the church of Agios Markos with its 6th century CE basilica, provided the inspiration for the Duplo scene below.

The murals of the Kaisariani monastery are particularly evocative, with their painted inscriptions and depictions of books and scrolls – a reminder of the huge numbers of medieval texts that didn’t survive. In fact we know that many of Kaisariani’s manuscripts were scrapped in the 19th century during the Greek War of Independence, taken to be used as military supplies like cartridge wadding.

One of my favourite examples is the Vari Cave, which has numerous inscriptions from the 5th century BCE as well as more recent ones. Some of the inscriptions tell us that a person named Archedamos cultivated the cave in honour of the nymphs by whom he was possessed. He is referred to as a Nympholept, literally a person taken by the nymphs. Archedamos is even depicted with hammer and chisel in the act of carving or inscribing, and the cave has a wonderful mix of natural features and human-added elements that respect the natural arrangement of the living rock. You have to imagine any human activity in the cave as being conditioned by its special surroundings, from eerie echoes to the flicker of flames in the gloom – it’s no wonder people felt it had some numinous quality. Lord Byron is probably the most famous person known to have visited the cave, but people have been visiting and even scratching their names on its walls for 2,500 years.

After spending months researching writing on Mount Hymettos, it has been both fun and therapeutic to try to recreate some of its scenes in Duplo, with the added fun of playing with my two-year old son Ben. At this point, however, I want to mention an important formative Lego-related occasion, for me and other members of my research group, which happened just last Thursday.

Our Visiting Fellow Helen Magowan, who is an expert in early modern Japanese writing and calligraphy, happens to have trained as a Lego Serious Play facilitator – essentially using Lego in the workplace for things like planning, teambuilding and other strategic purposes. It has huge potential for use in research, and we were delighted to road-test some ideas in a sort of taster session. We made small models in response to prompts to test the waters, and then we got to try building little scenes that represented our research on writing. Below you can see a gallery showing some scenes from the exercise, culminating in a collective effort to link our scenes together. (Participants were Helen Magowan, me, Jeiran Jahani, Emily Patterson, Yanru Xu and Tim Brookes.)

I could go on for hours about how stimulating and inspiring the session was – and fantastic fun too! – but instead I’m just going to show one little tableau I made, because it ties in with the theme of this post so nicely. Below you can see my attempt to represent the early adoption of alphabetic writing in Greece, using a quite random selection of Lego pieces we had to hand.

Let me explain because it’s not obvious to begin with! There are two people drinking from “cups” represented by clear-plastic round pieces. One person has two heads, because writing has opened up some interesting possibilities about how you represent people and things. Some of the inscribed cups from Hymettos and elsewhere are what we call “speaking objects”, featuring inscriptions that speak in the first person as if the object itself is speaking. For instance, one of the Hymettos examples says “I belong to Zeus but X wrote me” (the name is missing in a break in the pottery, sadly!). It is almost as if an extra voice is being created simply by the act of writing it into existence. This way of representing it felt like a flash of inspiration for my current research.

The second thing to note is that the person at the front of the scene has decided to do something a bit different and is writing on a stone monument. They’re also holding a telephone, to represent the power of writing to transmit ideas across time and space (sometimes known as “asynchronous communication”). What I find really interesting is that writing on stone was not something that existed in Greece before the 8th and especially the 7th century BCE (though it had been around longer in Anatolia and the Levant), when it suddenly became a popular medium. The “monumentalisation” of writing is on our agenda at the moment, as our remote Visiting Fellow Anna Bertelli is giving a talk about law codes written on temple walls in Archaic Crete next week (27th February: see here).

The story of writing on Mount Hymettos nicely encapsulates many of the issues I’ve been thinking about in early Greek alphabetic writing recently, from the early inscribing of drinking cups in communal settings to the developing relationships between humans and the land, and the peculiar ability of humans to quite literally inscribe themselves into the mountain. I hope you have enjoyed the journey and its Duplo/Lego illustrations. And if you want to follow up and read the published version of the article this is based on, you can find it HERE.

Now I wish you a very happy International Lego Classics Day, and please do stop and have a play yourself if you get the chance – you might be surprised what ideas you come up with! Please do share them with us, we’re always delighted to see people’s creations.

~ Pippa Steele (PI of the VIEWS project), in collaboration with her tiny playmate Ben who kindly let her (and helped her) play with his Duplo