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The discovery of the Law Code by Federico Halbherr in 1884 inaugurated the study of Cretan epigraphy, and in 1950 the publication of the Inscriptiones Creticae by Margherita Guarducci established the canonical ordination of the corpus of Gortynian legal inscriptions. The fourth volume of IC is inspired by various criteria (mainly palaeographical, topographical, and archaeological) and by the idea that Cretan writing practice evolved over time. The reader is left with the impression that the epigraphical history of Gortyn is that of a community searching for a

progressive writing perfection and that the Gortynian corpus is the result of an evolution from the smallest texts inscribed in the Pythion to the magnificent Law Code, aiming to establish perfect order. If such a method of collecting the evidence is pragmatic and useful, the impression of order seems to be positivistic and not completely persuasive.

On the other hand, a different question might be raised: do publicly displayed inscriptions represent a symptom of disorder? Did the spaces for publicly displaying laws, the walls of buildings, become battlegrounds for various factions within the polis? Departing from this simple question, the first part of this paper will describe the interplay between topographic development and places of epigraphic exhibition. The second part will analyze changes to the alphabet, and progressive modifications of the local script over the first half of the fifth century. The third and final part will study the public organization of writing, the enrollment of officials and professional specialists, and, as evidence of such epigraphical habit, the hands of scribes (poinikastai?) in Gortynian inscriptions.

The aim of this paper is to describe a picture of entropic dynamism and synaptic agonism, avoiding a simple and quasi-biological idea of evolution of writing. In sum, the inscriptions should not be considered as abstract, collateral, and separated phenomena, but an expression of the life of the polis.