In the study of past written traditions, but especially in the case of languages of which only fragments– in a literal and in a metaphorical sense– survive, questions of literacy and its position in the languages’ past social environments take centre stage. These questions relate, for instance, to the external or internal origin of literacy, to external influences on it, to the dispersal of its knowledge in society and its social diversification, and to its seat in life. Who writes for whom, what genres is writing used for, examples of what genres have survived and what has not survived but can be safely inferred to have existed? In the case of extinct languages and writing systems, another question relates to the factors that were important in the decline and death of literacy.