barry - the origin of the greek alphabet
TRANSCRIPT
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The Origin of the Greek Alphabet
Barry B. Powell
The Greek alphabet was a radical departure rom its model, West Semitic writing,
because it atomized speech. Homers loruit belongs in the eighth century BCE,
near the time o the invention o the Greek alphabet, which we date ca. 800 BCE bycomparing its orms with West Semitic orms and by extrapolating backward rom
the earliest epigraphic fnds. What historical causes underlay the alphabets invention?
The earlier logosyllabic writings o Mesopotamia and Egypt never inormed the
reader o how the writing sounded, nor did the syllabic Linear B or Cypriote syllabary.
The earliest Greek epigraphic inds are mostly hexametric, suggesting that the
need to record complex rhythms inherent in the alternation o vowels inspired a
single adapters invention o the Greek alphabet. Because Homer lived at about the
same time as the invention o the alphabet, he is likely himsel to have inspired the
invention. Texts o the IliadandOdysseycarried the secret o their decipherment and
established alphabetic literacy or Greece.
It is commonplace to praise the Greek alphabet, to say how it encouraged
the development of philosophy, science, and democracy, and we might say
this without derogating from the qualities of the admirable and ancient
forms of writing that originated in China around 1200 BCE, historically a
medium for high culture and deeply inuential on the Korean, Japanese,
and Vietnamese traditions. The West Semitic family of writings that
preceded the Greek in the Mediterranean Sea, including Phoenician,
Hebrew, and Arabic, has also had profound influence and continues
to exercise influence. But the Greek alphabet was radically different in
function from its predecessors, including its West Semitic Phoenician
model, in being the rst writing whose signs represented what we might
call the atoms of the spoken language, the smallest units of speech that
June 2010 | pp. 19-32 vol.
1,no.
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2010 by the Institute of Humanities, Seoul National University
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distinguish one utterance or word from another. In Greek alphabetic
writing the combination of graphic signs that represent these atomic
elements, or phonemes, enables the reader to reconstruct, more or less,the actual sound of the spoken word, and no earlier writing was able to do
this. It is this fact above all that supports Ignace Gelbs position that the
West Semitic writings were, from the point of view of internal structure,
syllabaries where each sign represents a consonant plus an additional
unspecied vowel, or no vowel.1
Without entering this controversy, we cannot doubt that the invention
of the Greek alphabet was a radical break from earlier traditions of writing,
and Gelbs thesis is a useful way of placing this break within an historicalcontext. We would like to know what the historical forces were that lay
behind the invention of the Greek alphabetthat is, what caused its
invention.
A seemingly dierent and altogether separate problem has to do with
the poet Homer. Certainly we possess theIliad and the Odyssey, the basic
literary texts in the Western tradition. But how do we have them? How
were they written down? Josephus in the ancient world (rst century BCE),
the Frenchman DAubignac in the early eighteenth century, and especiallythe German Friedrich August Wolf in the late eighteenth century, in his
celebrated Prolegomena ad Homerum of 1795, emphasized the difficulty
of supposing that Homers poems, composed in an illiterate age, could
have been fixed in writing by the poet himself. Speculations about the
relationship between writing and Homer constitute the heart of the famous
Homeric Question, which we might baldly summarize as: No writing, no
Homer!
By no means has modern research into oral composition altered thedilemma that Wolf eloquently argued. Even if Homer did compose his
poems orally without the aid of writing, they cannot have been transmitted
without the aid of writing, in the form in which we have them. Yet
leading Homerists agree, on the basis of complex evidence, that Homer
lived in the eighth century BCE, just when the very earliest scraps of the
Greek alphabet are found. Was a brand-new writingfashioned for such
mundane ends as to record business accounts (according to a common
view), and known but to few menexercised in its infancy and almost
1 Gelb,Study of Writing.
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Powell | The Origin of the Greek Alphabet 21
incidentally to record 28,000 lines of complicated verse on many dozens of
rolls of expensive papyrus?
Histories of writing do not generally attempt to answer the questionsHow? and Why? However, in my studies of the transition from oral
to written culture in ancient Greece, and in my speculations about the
differences between Greek alphabetic writing and early writings, I have
come to a conclusion at rst surprising, now not so much so, about how
and why the Greek alphabet was inventeda conclusion that bears directly
on the seemingly dierent question, How were theIliad and the Odyssey
written down? How did oral song become text?
Let us now treat these topics in this order: rst some general remarksabout what happened when the Greek alphabet was invented, based on
internal evidence; second, some words about how earlier forms of writing
worked in the ancient Near East and Mediterranean, in order to establish
a historical context; third, a look at examples of the very earliest surviving
remains of alphabetic writing; and nally, the conclusion itself: the origins
of Greek alphabetic literacy.
The Greek alphabet was invented by a single man at a single time.
We know this because in all local varieties of archaic Greek writing thereappear unique, hence inimitable, alterations of the Greek alphabets
Phoenician model. These unique alterations are, rst, the fairly arbitrary
derivation of the five Greek vowel signs from certain Phoenician
consonantal signs, and especially the splitting up of the single Phoenician
consonantal sign wau into two Greek signs, one consonantal with the value
/w/, later called digamma, the other vocalic, the sign later called upsilon
with the value /u/. The second unpredictable and therefore unrepeatable
alternation to its Phoenician model by the Greek alphabet is a confusedreassignment of name and value of the four Phoenician sibilants, a
complicated topic that I can mention here only in passing.
Orthographic evidence also encourages the conclusion that the Greek
alphabet was created by a single man at a single time, for the earliest
Greek writing was written boustrophedon, back and forth as the ox turns,
each line alternating in a different direction. This practice is in contrast
to the line-by-line Phoenician, always written from right to left. Archaic
Greek writing also disregards word division, normal for Phoenician writingin the eighth century BCE. It is incredible that more than one man would
at roughly the same time make exactly the same alterations in his model.
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22 HORIZONS, vol. 1, no. 1 (2010)
The adapter also added the so-called supplemental letters , , and
to the series, but because the sounds attached to these signs were not all
phonemic, considerable confusion in their values was to follow. This wilyPalamedes, who created the alphabet, I call the Adapter.
When did this happen, that the Adapter made his great discovery? In
the last several generations, guesses ranging from as early as 1400 BCE
to as late as 670 BCE have received serious attention. In the 1930s the
American scholar Rhys Carpenter laid the foundation for the modern view
on the problem, among classicists at least, when he insisted that the Greek
alphabet can not have been invented much earlier than its earliest extant
material remains.
2
It seemed incredible to Carpenter that a people whohistorically wrote on every kind of object, but especially on imperishable
ceramic ware, could have been literate for longer than a generation or so
before we begin actually to nd specimens of their writing.
Carpenters conclusions were accepted by the Oxford scholar Lillian
Jeffery3 and are accepted universally now by Greek epigraphists. The
very earliest dated examples of Greek writing, according to our present
knowledge, are placed at around 775-750 BCE, scratched on sherds from
Lefkandi, a major Iron Age archaeological site on the west coast of the longisland of Euboea, near the Euripus Channel, of all known sites from the
Greek Dark Ages the most wealthy. We are uncertain of the ancient name
of Lefkandi, but we cannot doubt that the Lefkandians were participants
in the foundation by Euboean Chalcis, near Lefkandi, of the earliest Greek
colony in the far west, on the island of Pithekoussai (modern Ischia in
the Bay of Naples), where other very early eighth-century examples of
Greek writing have been found. Recently published from ancient Gabii in
southern Latium (modern Osteria dell Osa) comes a securely dated vasewith part of a name, evidently in the Greek alphabet.4 Only one other sherd
from Lefkandi is as old. The Chalcidiansand perhaps Lefkandiansalso
had a permanent trading colony at the other end of the Mediterranean,
at Al Mina in north Syria near the mouth of the Orontes. Their pottery
has been found on Cyprus. Here, then, is the social circle and economic
environment within which the alphabet appears to have come into being.
2Carpenter, Antiquity of the Greek Alphabet.
3Jeery,Local Scripts.
4 Ridgway, Greek Letters.
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From a purely formal point of view, the moment at which the shapes of
the letters of archaic Greek writing seem to be most similar to the shapes
of the surviving examples of West Semitic writing, the alphabets model, isaround 800 BCEprovided we insist on comparing whole signaries and not
just this sign or that. This method is more easily described than fullled
because of the exiguous number of Phoenician inscriptions from the early
period, and there has been sharp disagreement about where the closest
t is. Still, around 800 BCE seems the best date for the adaptation on the
sole basis of epigraphic grounds. Here are two independent approaches,
then, converging at the same pointa date for the earliest extant material
remains at around 775 BCE, and the moment of closest formal resemblanceat around 800 BCE.
We should accept that the date of the invention of the Greek alphabet
was around 800 BCE; other dates are not to be taken seriously. Whether
the Adapter made his invention in Syrian Al Mina, in Cyprus, on Crete, in
Euboea, or someplace else, we cannot be sure, because we are concerned
with the achievement of a single man working alone. Except for a slight
reform of three letter values made by an Ionian around 600 BCE (, ,
and ), and the addition of the diacritical variant of omicron as omegato the end of the series, no other substantive changes were ever made to
the Greek alphabet after the moment of its creation. Like Athena from the
head of Zeus, the Greek alphabet sprang fully formed from the head of its
fashioner, fully armed.
But what sort of change was the invention of the alphabet, as an
historical event? Too often, while acknowledging that the Greek alphabet
is a wonderful thing, people assume that it was bound to happen sooner or
later, whether because all things get better in the course of time or becausethe Greek alphabet was a slight modication of the Phoenician syllabary,
and thus a logical extension of what had gone before in writing. Neither
of these positions is justified. Writing systems are the most conservative
of human institutions, except for religion, which is often intimately bound
up with writing. Korea can present a good example of such conservatism,
preserving the older, far more complex traditional writing based on
Chinese writing for hundreds of years after King Sejong promulgated
the famous alphabetic Korean Hangeul writing in 1446 CE. Scholars citeChinese writing itself, and rightly so, as an example of the triumph of
conservatism over practicality in writing, but the same choice was made in
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other traditions.
From an historical point of view, the alphabetic writing currently used
to encode English, now lingua franca for the planet, has gone backwardand even adopted word-signs, or logograms, no dierent in function from
those used in ancient Egyptian or Sumerian writing. A familiar example
is the sentence A ROUGH COUGH PLOUGHED THROUGH A DOUGHY
HICCOUGH, in which the sign-combination [OUGH] has no consistent
phonetic value. The reader must first know how the word is to be
pronounced and then recognize its conventional representation, which one
learns on a case-by-case basis.
A system of writing will often go backward like this. In general, soconservative is writing as an institution that ordinarily only a break in
culture will create conditions favorable to significant change. Kemal
Ataturks 1926 mandate against Arabic script in favor of Roman script
was an eort to make the process work the other way, to create a break
in culture by forcing a break in the writing tradition. In modern Korea,
the favor now shown Hangeul writing also promotes a break from ancient
traditions and favors a democratization of culture both in the republican
south and the communist north. The illiterate Greeks of the eighth centuryBCE, set against the literate East, had the break in culture we are looking
for, but there was never a necessity that they invent the Greek alphabet.
The Greek alphabet is a highly idiosyncratic form of writing, and we
should seek persuasive causes to explain its appearance.
Examples of how writing worked in the ancient Near East before the
Greek alphabet will help us see what sort of causes might explain the
event. The Greek alphabet is a remote descendant of Egyptian hieroglyphic
writing through a long, twisting path. Egyptian hieroglyphic writingis typical of a whole class of early writing systems, whose other great
exemplar is Sumerian and Akkadian cuneiform, a class of writings usually
called word-syllabic or logosyllabic. In logosyllabic writing, a phonetic sign
will stand for a whole word or for a syllable. There are also other signs
without phonetic value, called semantic indicators (or determinatives), that
place a word in some general class. Here is the Egyptian name for the star
Orion with phonetic equivalents in Roman characters:
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(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7)
sx sx3x 3x sx3x star god
= sxaxx
The first sign, folded cloth, represents a sibilant /s/ plus an unknown
vowel, designated by superscripted x. The second sign, backbone (?),
repeats the value /s/ plus an unknown vowel and adds the value /glottal
stop/, represented graphically by the 3, plus an unknown vowel. Thethird sign, vulture, repeats the value /glottal stop/ plus an unknown
vowel. The forth sign, twisted rope, adds new phonetic information,
indicating a /voiceless pharyngeal fricative/ (a sound made by closing
the throat) plus an unknown vowel. The fth sign, toes, now sums up
the phonetic information already given to represent three consonants
/s/, /glottal stop/, and the /voiceless pharyngeal fricative/and has no
phonetic value, being a semantic indicator that tells the reader this word
refers to a star. The seventh sign, god, is a second semantic indicator,telling the reader that this word has the attributes of a god.
As a matter of method, modern Egyptian philology eschews direct
apprehension of Egyptian writing, approaching the meaning encoded in
the writing through a stepped process whereby first the Egyptian signs
are reduced to a theoretical phonetic construction expressed by means of
more-or-less Roman alphabetic characters, as in the above example. Only
then can the meaning be deduced from the alphabetic reconstruction.
Transliterating the seven signs that spell the Egyptian word for theconstellation Orion, the modern Egyptologist reconstructs a triconsonantal
word consisting of /s/, /glottal stop/, and a /voiceless pharyngeal
fricative/, which the Egyptologist will pronounce in a classroom as
something like sah, although sah in no sense aspires to reconstruct the
actual pronunciation of the ancient Egyptian word. Egyptian logosyllabic
writing, in spite of its elaborate complexity, is incapable of imparting the
slightest information about vocalic qualities. Seven signs, complex to draw,
yield information about three consonants and never tell the reader howthe word sounds. Ancient Egyptian writing was not meant for modern
Egyptologists but for ancient Egyptians, who knew how the word sounded.
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We find a different example of prealphabetic writing in an early
tradition of Greek literacy, namely, the Linear B script used in the Bronze
Age palaces of Crete and Mycenae. Less well known is another syllabicscript, related in some way to Linear B (or to its predecessor, Linear A) and
used on the island of Cyprus, namely, the Cypriote syllabary. The classical
form of the Cypriote syllabary was used from the eighth century BCE
(though a single example dates from ca. 1100 BCE) until the third century
BCE, side by side with the Greek alphabetan extraordinary example of
the conservatism of writing systems. The Cypriote signary has around fty-
ve signs, ve of which stand for pure vowels and fty of which represent
open syllables consisting of a consonant plus one of the ve vowels, suchas /ka/, /ke/, /ki/, /ko/, /ku/. No distinction is made between voiced,
aspirated, and voiceless stops, so that, for example, /ba/, /pa/, and
/pha/ are all represented by the same sign. Conventionally transcribed,
the first few words of the longest surviving inscription in this writing
the celebrated bronze tablet from Idalionreads as follows (though the
original was written from right to left):
o-te-ta-po-to-li-ne-e-ta-li-o-neka-te-wo-ro-ko-ne-ma-to-i
This hardly looks like Greek, but would be written in Greek alphabetic
characters (with Roman transliteration) as:
()
Hote ta ptolin Edalion kateworgon Madoi
When the Medes overcame the city of Idalion . . .
In even this short fragment we notice how the aspiration in (Hote) is
not indicated in the Cypriote text (o-te); how the nasal of the accusative
definite article is omitted; how the consonant cluster (pt) cannot be
represented; how the final consonant /n/ in (ptolin) is written
ne; how, because no distinction is made between voiced, aspirated, and
voiceless stops, the writing does not tell us whether /g/ or /k/ is meant, or
whether the Medes are pronounced , , or (madoi, matoi,
mathoi). We cannot tell from the writing how the Greek sounded but are
expected, as native speakers, to know from the rich phonetic information
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Powell | The Origin of the Greek Alphabet 27
that the writing imparts.
The Cypriote syllabary, just like its predecessor and probable congener
Linear B, is a highly advanced system of phonetic writing of wonderfulelegance that has jettisoned the heavy baggage of semantic and phonetic
indicators characteristic of the earlier logosyllabic writings. This brilliant
writing, built on earlier Cretan discoveries, has reduced the complement of
its signary from many hundreds to around fty-ve simple phonetic signs.
Still, phonetic writing before the Greek alphabet was different in kind
from the Greek alphabet because, just as with the earlier logosyllabaries,
it was always designed to remind a native speaker of words whose sound
in speech he already knew. Scribes do not make writings for the world butfor themselves and their compatriots, a principle that also governed the
Phoenician writing from which the Greek alphabet comes.
A Phoenician inscription of around 600 BCE begins with signs that
mean I am Yhwmlk, King of Byblos, written right to left as:
and transliterated as xnxkx Yxx wxmxlxkx (the sign means a glottal stop,
the same as 3 in Egyptological studies; the superscripted x stands for a
vowel or no vowel). The Phoenician is unpronounceable on the evidence
of the wholly consonantal information imparted by the writing. It is not
that Greek, or any other language, cannot be written down without an
alphabet; Greek was so written twice in history. But Greek alphabetic
writing is distinctly idiosyncratic in the ancient world, where logosyllabicand syllabic systems supported great civilizations, in its attempt to record
the actual sound of the human voice.
What were the earliest uses to which the Greek alphabet was put,
according to the surviving examples? A celebrated example is the
hexameter and some additional signs scratched on a pot, evidently a
prize jug awarded in an athletic contest, from Athens of around 730 BCE.
A translation of the text reads Whoever of all the dancers now dances
most gracefully, implying that that dancer will get this pot, although thethought was never completed in the inscription. This earliest surviving
Greek inscription is also our earliest surviving evidence for oral poetry
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in Greece, for from the diction we know that the hexameter line here
recorded was composed by an oral poet, a possessor of the living tradition
of Greek oral verse, like Homer and Hesiod. But who wrote down thehexameter line on this pot? And why?
Nearly as old is a remarkable three-line graffito on a cup of crude
ware found in the eighth-century cemetery on the island of Pithekoussai
in the Bay of Naples, where Euboeans placed the earliest western outpost
of classical Greece. The inscription is also dated to around 730 BCE and
means I am the cup of Nestor [rst line], a joy to drink from. Whoever
drinks this cup [second line], straightway that man will the desire of
beautiful-crowned Aphrodite seize [third line]. This extraordinary andprimordial inscription appears to be the product of a symposiastic capping
game, where verse-contests accompanied ritual drinking. The rst drinker
sets up the game by the mock-epic, I am the cup of Nestor, nice to drink
from, applied to a humble ware decidedly unlike the mighty cup of gold
that Homer celebrates in the eleventh book of the Iliad. The second diner
matches the challenge with a skillful variation, in dactylic hexametric
rhythm, of a common curse-formula of the type, Whoever steals mehe
will be struck blind, or go crazy. The third diner now must pronouncehis own doom, also in a pure hexameterAnd his punishment will be
to know the delights of love! Someone at the party who knew how to
write down Greek hexameters actually recorded the game on this cup.
This second oldest example of Greek alphabetic writing in the world also
appears to be a literary allusion to theIliad, implying that a text of Homers
poem existed in the eighth century and was known even in far-o Italy.
Other pieces of alphabetic writing long enough to be called an
inscription survive from the rst 100 or 150 years of Greek writing. Morethan a few are hexametrical. Our impression is that Greek literacy first
ourished in a world socially noble and temperamentally agonistic, similar
to Homers description of life in the palace, where there was good food
and abundant drink in the midst of athletic contests, self-assertion, and
oral song. To this world belonged the dance contests of the Attic prize jug
and the literary fun and erotic innuendo of the Nestors cup capping game.
Here at the feast and the festival sat the oral poet, center of attention, rich
in honor from the glory of his song. Early Greek writing is not attachedto the businessmans ledger, nor does it celebrate the triumphs of men or
of the city. From the rst one hundred years of Greek alphabetic writing
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there is not a single public inscriptiondecree, treaty, or remembrance of
common martial exploit; not one public dedication to a god, and only three
certain private dedications to a god; no inventories, catalogues, records oftreasure, building specications, nancial accounts of any kind, not even
any numbers until around 600 BCE. The material record preserves not
one word connected with the doings of one state or collective body with
another. The silence about public affairs is uninterrupted. Although the
inscriptions are wholly of a private nature, even here we miss categories
well attested later: no legal documents, wills, manumissions, contracts,
mortgages, or transfers of land. There is nothing that suggests mercantile
interests of any kind. The close association between hexametric poetryand early writing, by contrast, is powerfully attested. Hexametric poetry
was even the natural means of expression for the early possessors of Greek
literacy.
The evidence from the material remains agrees with what we might
predict from the history of writing. In the need to record the Greek
hexameter we have found the necessary cause for the creation of a
writing that attempts to record the actual sound of the human voice.
The Greek hexameter was a form of Greek, but one that no one everspoke, a Kunstsprache fashioned from an admixture of different dialects,
archaisms, and artificial forms that served the metrical needs of the
dactylic hexametric rhythm. It was a sort of special language, learned by
absorption, if we trust the analogy of modern oral poets, and spoken only
by the bards. The rhythms of the Greek hexametric line were inherent in
the alternation of long and short vowels, which often appear in clusters. It
is possible to record Greek in a syllabary, even in the Phoenician syllabary,
but it is not possible to recreate the Greek hexameter from a syllabic text.We have found the historical cause for the origin of a writing not satised
with reminding a native speaker of words in a language he already knows:
There are no native speakers of the Greek hexameter.
If the Adapter fashioned his system in order to record metrical verse,
then what metrical verse? Was the Adapters invention inspired by the
desire to record metrical verse in general, as a technology of general
applicability, or did one singer inspire his invention?
What about Homer? When did he live? When did his songs becometext? By consensus, leading Homerists have long placed him in the eighth
century BCE (although there is always someone ready to disagree), but
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30 HORIZONS, vol. 1, no. 1 (2010)
where exactly in the eighth century he belongs is hard to say. Our best
basis for dating Homer is by comparison of the world he describes with
the archaeological record, although Homers world is a poetic world thatnever existed just as he describes it. Any time between 850 and 750 BCE
will accord with the complicated evidence we can gather, and sometime
in the middle might t bestthe very time probable for the invention of
the Greek alphabet. Nothing would interfere with a conclusion that around
800 BCE Homer sat down and dictated his poems to the inventor of the
Greek alphabet. By any reckoning, the Homeric poems were composed
close to the time of the invention of the Greek alphabet. We return full
circle to the Homeric Question: What is the relationship between writingand the Iliad and the Odyssey? Was a new writingfashioned to record
hexametric verseinspired by an unknown poet or poets who disappeared
without trace, while at about the same time it preserved 28,000 lines of
complicated verse composed by the greatest poet in Western culture?
Around the beginning of the eighth century BCE, a tradition of oral
poetry ourished in Hellas that reached back into the Greek Bronze Age
and probably farther. The poets of that day entertained in aristocratic
households. Some poets were good and others not so good, but Homerinstilled into traditional song a moral force, narrative brilliance, raucous
humor, and lyrical intensity that set him above his peers. Plausibly Homer
moved toward the social circle of the prosperous and aggressive Euboeans,
the inhabitants of Chalcis and ancient Lefkandi who sailed to Italy while
at the same time trading at the other end of the Mediterranean Sea, at Al
Mina in North Syria. Euboeans intermarried with Semitic-speakersthere
is epigraphic evidenceboth in Italy and in the Levant. There must have
been bilingual children, speaking Greek but heir to Semitic traditions,including writing by means of a short syllabic signary consisting of around
twenty-two signs. Hearing Homer sing, someone resolved to write down
his song in the same way that documents in West Semitic had been taken
down by dictation for generations, or from the beginning.
Any such bilingual lover of oral verse would soon discover that the
West Semitic syllabary could not ax the Greek poetic line by means of
graphic signs (consider the Homeric form aaatos, decisive!). In recording
only the consonantal values that introduce or close a syllable, accordingto the principles of Egyptian and Phoenician writing, the original form of
the verse, inherent in vowel clusters and the many unpredictable dialectal
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forms, is lost. Assigning vocalic qualities to ve of the Phoenician signs,
arbitrarily or because the Semitic consonant sounded to his ears like Greek
vowels, the Adapter discovered the principle that no vowel quality can beassumed from the readers experience of the spoken language to go with
any given consonantal sign, as the Phoenician syllabary worked, so that
every vowel quality must be annotated explicitly. In exalting vowel signs
to the same status as the consonantal signs, he reduced the Phoenician
syllabograms to the Greek alphabetic signs that quite inadvertently were to
change the world.
With the revised technology, the original purpose was fulfilled. The
Adapter, or someone in the project, was wealthya merchant, perhaps?The cost of papyrus alone would be large. Homer would require several
weeks to dictate our Iliad and Odyssey, under unique conditions, never
repeatable, that favored poems far too long and complex ever to have ever
been part of the poets ordinary repertoire. TheIliad and the Odysseywere
a collaborative effort, sprung from the intersection of a new technology
with the master wielder of an ancient tradition of oral verse-making. While
coming from a tradition of oral verse-making, texts of the Iliad and the
Odysseyappear to have created the tradition of Greek alphabetic literacy,and for this reason they always stood as classic texts within it.
When such a labor was done, who beyond the Adapter could read the
many rolls of expensive papyrus? The text, or portions thereof, were copied
and circulated, and with the texts went the secrets of their decipherment
the row of signs, the names of the signs, and their phonetic valuesthe
beginning and always the heart of Greco/Roman education. Alphabetic
literacy spread rapidly through Hellas. Homers poems defined Greek
values, and established the technology of alphabetic literacy for Greece andGreeces heirs.
University of WisconsinMadison
KEYWORDS | alphabet, hieroglyphs, cuneiorm, Homer, logosyllabary, syllabary, Greek inscriptions
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Bibliography
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Archaeology37, no. 1 (1933): 829.
Gelb, Ignace J.A Study of Writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955.
Jeery, L. H. The Local Scripts of Archaic Greece. Rev. ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1990.
Ridgway, D. Greek Letters at Osteria dell Osa. American Journal of Archaeology
80 (1997): 8797.