Several of the gold leaves relate the initiate’s underworld journey to obtain a drink from the waters of memory (mnemosyne). Against the influential interpretation of Jean-Pierre Vernant, who argued that memory in the tablets was a departure from early Greek poetry, I contend that mnemosyne in these texts reflects concerns and ideas from early Greek poetry. Focusing especially on texts from Hipponion and Entella, which were unknown to Vernant, I argue that the ambiguous theme of memory was variously adapted by different ritual performers. Two texts reveal developments of communicative memory from poetic diction (with parallels in Hesiod). At other times, memory designates the mystic community as the group that assures postmortem salvation: in this respect, mnemosyne has a significance like that in lyric poetry (Theognis, Sappho). Pindar, whose afterlife imagery parallels the tablets, shows that positive eschatology can be incorporated with other strategies of memory. The treatment of the name and gender show finally that the tablets can be understood as a practice of memory, in which the identity of the deceased was reshaped and remembered according to the priorities of the group.

Scholars since the nineteenth century have debated whether the gold leaves are “amulets.” This and other magical labels have distorted discussion among scholars about the materiality of the tablets. Instead, I approach the gold leaves through the analytical approach of Material Religion, which examines religious practices primarily in terms of their material expressions rather than their supposed belief content. Viewed through this lens, the tablets and their texts find three useful comparisons: first, the genre of hexameter incantations (epoidai), which points to analogies in performance practice between medicine and private mysteries; second, the inscribed Ephesia Grammata, which articulate a logic of materialization comparable to that of the gold leaves; and third, inscribed lead curses, which supply a material infrastructure for communication with the powers of the underworld. The material approach suggests that the materiality of the tablets constituted an aspect of their poetic performance.

Greek poetic tradition, including practices of live performance, played a key role in shaping Bacchic mysteries. Ritual officiants seized on language, images, and concepts from a traditional poetic repertoire, selecting, combining, and reinterpreting them to suit both the ritual occasion (initiation, burial) and the specific preferences of individual clients. The gold leaves are products of this dynamic. They develop the theme of memory in several different directions, often echoing the language and thought patterns of early epic and lyric; they share fictions of commemoration with funerary epigrams, even using such devices in similar ways; their physical form shows the influence of verse incantations; and even their material points toward metal symbolisms of epic. In all these aspects, the tablets reflect an engagement with the themes and vocabulary of early Greek poetry and its multifaceted performance culture.

In Book 7 of his famous Historíai, the Greek historian Herodotus wrote about Xerxes I, the king who in 480 BCE was mounting the second Persian invasion of Greece and would shortly fight the famous Battle of Thermopylae. But first, in an exceedingly odd footnote to history, Xerxes apparently needed to count his men, so when he came to a vast coastal plain in Thrace, a region that today overlaps the modern countries of Bulgaria, Turkey, and Greece, he halted his army.

Chapter 6 looks at some of the roles played by the domestic buildings of the wealthier and more powerful members of society in Greek communities, particularly during the fourth and third centuries BCE. Over time there was a dramatic growth in the size and opulence of the largest houses. It seems to be the case that the symbolic role of the house began to shift, with owners using their properties as statements of personal power and wealth to an extent which had not been acceptable before. Such changes are most obvious in the late Classical and Hellenistic periods at royal cities such as Vergina and Pella (Greek Macedonia), where monumental palatial buildings covered thousands of square metres. It is argued that, to some extent, their emergence can be viewed as the continuation of a trend already visible by the earlier fourth century BCE in cities like Olynthos and Priene.

Chapter 2 explores archaeological evidence for housing in mainland Greece, the eastern Aegean islands, and Greek settlements on the west coast of Asia Minor. The period covered runs from around 950 BCE to about 600 BCE. The Chapter highlights the fact that a growth in the scale and complexity of the communities themselves during this period was accompanied by the creation of a broader variety of buildings with more specialised roles, as well as by an increase in the size and segmentation of residential buildings. While the exact reason for this change in domestic architecture cannot be pinpointed (and may have been different in different settlements) social factors are suggested as playing a significant role. The Chapter discusses how to interpret the archaeological remains at a number of sites including: Nichoria (Peloponnese), Eretria (Euboia), Lefkandi Toumba (Euboia), Skala Oropou (Attica) and Zagora (Andros). Emphasis is placed on the diversity of house forms in different locations and on differences in the ways in which houses changed through time.

Scholars reconstruct the prehistoric population movements that ultimately distributed the human species around the planet from three sources of evidence: fossil specimens, archaeological remains, and DNA. While all three diverge in their details, they generally agree that an ancestral species, Homo erectus, migrated into Eurasia about 1.6 million years ago, and our own species, Homo sapiens, emerged in Africa around 300,000 years ago and had left it by 100,000 years ago.1 H. sapiens reached Australia by 65,000 years ago, Europe by 45,000 years ago, and the Americas by 15,000 years ago.2

This is a book about what numbers are and where they come from, as understood through their materiality, the material devices used to represent and manipulate them: things like fingers, tallies, tokens, and symbolic notations. This book is concerned with the natural or counting numbers – the sequence one, two, three, four, and so on, and maybe as high as ten or twenty or hundred – that are the basis of arithmetic and mathematics. While the book focuses on how concepts of number emerge and ultimately become elaborated as arithmetic and mathematics through the use of material devices, it will also examine related phenomena, like the way numbers vary cross-culturally.

Consider the humble tally. Whether it is made of notched wood, knotted string, a torn leaf, strung beads, loose pebbles, marks painted on the body or inscribed on the ground, the fingers, the fingers and toes, or the fingers plus other body parts, a tally is a simple device, as material forms go, one that requires few resources to learn or invent from scratch. But because it is a material form that is not a part of the body, the tally represents an extremely powerful mechanism – the ability of the material form to accumulate and distribute cognitive effort – that for numbers begins with the tally and continues today with calculators and computers. If the tally is easy for a novice to understand, use, make, and invent, a device like the computer is not, even for an expert. This is because at some point, the amount of cognitive effort needed exceeds what a single individual, or even an entire generation of people, can manage on its own. Material devices also have a capacity for manipulability and morphological change that far exceeds what bodies and behaviors are capable of; they are also public and shareable in ways that bodies and behaviors are not. The tally thus represents a significant step in harnessing the agency of material forms toward numerical purposes.