Volume 8, Number 3 · February 23, 1967
A Silent World
By Arnaldo Momigliano
Ancient Europe from the Beginnings of Agriculture to Classical Antiquity
by Stuart Piggott
Aldine, 243 pp., $7.50
I wish I knew who invented the word 'preliteracy' to indicate the illiteracy of certain extinct or living cultures. The word is not to be found even in the 1959 edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. In American dictionaries it has made its appearance only in recent years. Neither 'preliterate' nor 'preliteracy' are registered in the 1942 Chicago Dictionary of American English. The 1949 edition of the Funk and Wagnall New Standard Dictionary lists 'preliterate' only. In the end I found both 'preliterate' and 'preliteracy' in the 1961 edition of Webster's New International Dictionary. What makes me curious about this word is that, though apparently of very recent origin, it reflects the attitudes of prehistorians and anthropologists of several decades ago. Preliteracy points to literacy as the next step in human evolution. Professor Leslie A. White was correct in substance—even if slightly anachronistic in form—when in his 1964 Presidential Address to the American Anthropological Association he declared: 'The cultural anthropologists of the latter part of the nineteenth and of the early part of the twentieth centuries…conceived of their task as the study of preliterate cultures, both for the living and the extinct or prehistoric.'[1]
Review, 2162 words
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