We tend to take literacy and its prestige for granted. We regard higher literacy rates as desirable, lack of literacy a sign of backwardness, but without thinking carefully about either the character or advantages of literacy, or the nature of its supposed converse, communication by word of mouth. In the study of the past, the written word is elevated above the oral, the written document generally much preferred as evidence to oral tradition, and written sources given more attention than oral ones, even when the written sources actually derive from oral communication. The reasons for this elevation are, one suspects, more a matter of inherited assumptions and beliefs than of individual thought about the nature of the written word (whose application is in fact exceedingly complex). A strong tradition of historiography and political thought has seen literacy as essential to civilization and liberal democracy. As Gibbon put it, ‘the use of letters is the principal circumstance that distinguishes a civilized people from a herd of savages, incapable of knowledge or reflection’ – a belief which recurs today, though expressed differently. Nineteenthcentury political theorists (and indeed modern ones) could not conceive of liberal democracy without widespread literacy. Since classical Athens was seen as the epitome of both civilization and democracy, it followed that Athenian citizens were highly literate.

Greater understanding of oral communication and tradition are in some ways now modifying these assumptions of the superiority of literacy. Oral communication and oral tradition have more positive associations, and the term ‘orality’ has been coined to avoid the obvious negative connotations of ‘illiteracy’.