It was reckoned for a long time that the borrowing of Phoenician writing by the Greeks took place at a fairly late date, because the oldest alphabetical inscriptions that we know of (generally written from right to left or in boustrophedon mode) were dated to around 700 BC. The inscriptions in question are the texts found on the island of Thera, the Dipylon inscription, Nestor’s cup from Pithecusses, on the island of Ischia, some shards from Corinth, vases from Hymettus. It was also Rhys Carpenter’s opinion, who did not think that Greek writing went further back than 720–700 BC.250 But since then, the number of archaic Greek inscriptions has grown. The oldest ones, of the Euboean kind (the Euboans spoke an Ionian dialect), date to 770–750, if not earlier. One of the most important discoveries was an inscription in the Euboean Greek alphabet on a vase from around 750 BC found in 1984 in Italy, in the Osteria dell’Osa necropolis, in Lazio. This discovery shows that even before the Greek colonization of the Italian peninsula, the Euboean alphabet had spread to that region. Another alphabetical Greek inscription dating to –740 was found in 2001 on the bronze bowl in Midas’s burial mound in Gordium (Gordion), capital of ancient Phrygia. “The available data,” writes Maria Giulia Amadasi Guzzo, “confirms that the Greeks knew how to write as early as the first quarter of the 8th century and that the first one to use ‘Phoenician letters’ were the Euboeans.”251 Moreover, the very existence of a list of the winners of the Olympic games, which started in 776 BC, gives us reason to believe that there was a writing at the time. John F. Healey writes:
The diversification of Greek writings took some time, which suggests that the date when the alphabet was imported is much earlier than the 8th century […] Furthermore, in the 8th century, writing from right to left was already the norm for writings derived from Phoenician, so it is hard to imagine the Greeks borrowing the alphabet at such a late date and showing hesitations on what the writing direction should be.252
Nowadays, the Greek alphabet is commonly believed to have appeared from the end of the 10th century BC to the beginning of the 9th century BC, if not earlier. Margherita Guarducci believes it was in the 9th century.253 John F. Healey thinks that “the earliest possible date would likely be around 1100–1050,” which matches Berthold Louis Ullmann’s 1930s estimations that put the borrowing in the 11th or 12th century BC, meaning during the Dorian invasions.254 “It seems plausible,” writes Charles Higounet, “that the borrowing and adaptation of the Phoenician alphabet by the Greeks took place around the end of the 2nd millennium, or at the very beginning of the 1st one.”255
The location where the transmission took place is just as much talked about. Many diverse theories have been put forth (Cyprus, Rhodes, Crete, Asia minor, etc.), but they are only suppositions. The fact that there were originally several different Greek alphabets hinders theories arguing that there was a unique source.256 The unification of those alphabets took place during the writing reform in Athens in 403–402, which made the Ionic alphabet the standard.
Unlike what some thought, the Greeks definitely did not start using writing for economic or trading purposes -bookkeeping-, because no economic document has been found in the Greek world during the beginnings of writing. The initial use of writing seems to have rather been linked with poetic notation, especially in the case of Homeric poems. There is no doubt that the formatting of the Iliad and the Odyssey as we know them is linked to the use of alphabetical writing in Greece.257
Still, the question of the Phoenician alphabet’s transmission to Greece remains open. How could Phoenician writing give birth to Greek writing? Was there a borrowing or did both the Phoenicians and the Greeks use at the same an alphabet derived from a common set of signs?258 Can the similarity between the two writings be explained by causation, a common heritage, or both?
An alphabetical writing implies the complete breakdown of the language’s sounds into simple phonemes. The twenty-two letter Phoenician alphabet isn’t actually one since it doesn’t include the vowels. Its signs are associated with a full syllable made of a constant consonant and a variable vowel. But a consonantal writing didn’t suit the notation of a language like Greek, which indicates the function of a word in a sentence by adding a ending most of the time made of a vowel. James Février goes as far as writing that in his opinion, “there was no reason for the Greeks to adopt Phoenician writing.”259
As a full-fledged alphabet, as early as the 8th century the Greek alphabet was made of twenty-four signs, vowels and consonants. The Greeks introduced vowels, maybe because they wanted to keep “the memory of the former Mycenaean syllabary, which made a clear cut between syllables from different sets of vowels,” writes François Chamoux.260 The vowels were supposedly obtained from the conversion of some guttural Phoenician consonants (the consonant ‘alef became the vowel alpha, hé became epsilon, wau gave birth to digamma and then to upsilon, yod was converted into iota, ayin into omicron). Adding those vowels, which were called in the Middle Ages Matres lectionis, “mothers of reading,” has obviously been decisive. The first beneficiaries were literature and poetry, and then tragedy.261 Indeed, it is only then that the writing system could represent all the sounds of the language, with a single character for each phoneme. The number of characters was also limited. Whereas the former syllabaries make a symbol match with sound for every individual sound of the language, which can end in systems made up of hundreds of signs, the Greek alphabet breaks down the syllable into all its phonic parts. It abandons the syllable as a graphic unit (“ba be bi bo bu,” etc.) and substitutes it for a very different kind of unit, a more abstract king (“a b c d e,” etc.) that goes against the most immediate perception of language. That is why Eric A. Havelock said that the Greek system can be considered to be “the first and only genuine alphabet.”262
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Before the Phoenicians
There were many writing systems present in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Near East much before the Phoenicians. The two oldest ones, which are also the most famous and well-spread ones, are the Egyptian hieroglyphs and the Sumerian cuneiform writing. Both seem to have appeared in the middle of the 4th millennium BC. The first Egyptian hieroglyphs appeared around –3400, under the dynasty of Thinis, so before the birth of the proper pharaonic civilization. The most ancient known artefact is the tablets of Ahā, the first king of the dynasty of Thinis. The hieroglyphic writing was the one used on monuments, which was later on simplified into hieratic writing and then into demotic writing. However, the first great discursive texts with complex sentences only appear around –2680, under Djoser’s (or Djeser) reign, sovereign of the third dynasty, who built the pyramid in Saqqara.
The Sumerian tradition attributes the invention of writing to Enmerkar, the second representative of the Uruk dynasty. The most ancient known artefact bearing writing, clay tablets called Uruk IV with archaic cuneiform signs, supposedly date back to 3200 BC, but that date was not confirmed. The origin of the Sumerians, a people who were neither Indo-European nor Semitic — which is also the case for the Elamites, the Hurrians and the Urartians — remains mysterious. Their ethnogenesis was first thought to have been central Asia, but the theory was dropped. In 1951, the American assyriologist Ephraim Avigdor Speiser thought that they settled in Lower-Mesopotamia, probably by the sea from a site located to the east. In France, André Parrot leaned towards Anatolia and so believed they came from the north. The Sumerian civilization actually could have been the result of a pre-Indo-European wave of expansion that eventually became the Mediterranean cultures that used to be commonly called “Asianic,” because they weren’t Semitic nor Indo-European.
Like the other peoples related to them, the Sumerians spoke an agglutinating language, meaning (in opposition to inflected languages) a language that adds pre- or post-posited particles to verbal or nominal roots that are generally invariable. Cuneiform writing, that quickly started being called Sumero-Akkadian, was also used all over Asia minor, mainly for utilitarian purposes.
The “Proto-Sinaiti
c” script should also be mentioned. This term refers to about thirty inscriptions found in 1904 by the Englishman Flinders Petrie near the mining camps of Serabit el-Khadim in the desert of the Sinai. The oldest ones are graffitis that supposedly go back to around 1600 BC. Alan Gardiner offered in 1916 a deciphering that still isn’t unanimously supported. These inscriptions comprise some sort of alphabet seemingly derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs which seems to denote a west Semitic language. Gerhard Herm attributes them to “‘Canaanites,’ meaning Proto-Phoenicians from the libano-palestinian region.”263 They were also attributed to the Hyksos,264 a population whose origin is very poorly known.
The Hyksos (in Egyptian demotic heka khasewet, literally “masters of foreign lands”) are said to have introduced the war chariot to Egypt, as well as the composite bow and weapons birthed from the bronze industry. A west Semitic origin was sometimes attributed to them, but recent works have shown that their language does not belong to the Semitic language group.265 They invaded Egypt, where they removed the leaders of the fourteenth dynasty and founded the fifteenth and sixteenth dynasties (between 1674 and 1548 BC). In 1933, Carl Watzinger was the first to give them a Hurrian origin. His theory was then picked up by the German Egyptologist Hans Wolfgang Helck, who saw in them a composite blend of Hurrians and Indo-Europeans that migrated east to first settle in Anatolia.266 Gerharm Herm considers them to be “Indo-Germanic.” But they were also suggested to have been Amorites, form Akkadians, Syro-Canaanites, Proto-Phoenicians and even Mycenaeans. The very reality of a Hyksos invasion was also questioned by some authors, in particular Jürgen von Beckerath.267
Finally, there are the Cretan writings, among which the most famous is Linear A. Its vestiges were discovered by Arthur Evans at the beginning of the 20th century.268 This writing, which has yet to be deciphered, was used in ancient Crete during the period of the first Minoan palaces, so around 1900 BC. Distinct from the ancient Cretan hieroglyphic, Linear A comprised eighty-five signs and ideograms. Its older inscriptions are on clay tablets found in the Hagia Triada archaeological site in southern Crete. Harald Haarmann269 suggested that the writing was brought by populations who came from Danubian cultures of the “Old Europe,” and that they were chased out by the arrival of Indo-Europeans to the Aegean Sea, Crete and the Cyclades. There was also the theory that Linear A didn’t represent an agglutinating language, like it was believed for a long time, but rather a language related to Luwian (or Luvian) or another language from the Anatolian group, or even the Indo-Iranian branch of Indo-European.270
Linear A, which was a tool of the Minoan thalassocracy, spread far and wide on the continent and all over the Aegean basin as from the middle of the 15th century BC: it was found in Cyprus, in most of the Aegaen Sea islands, and as far as the Aeolian Islands, north of Sicily. From that writing sprung other writings, like the Cyprio-Minoan (around the 16th century BC), the Linear B (around the 15th century BC), and the syllabic Cypriot (not before the 11th century BC). The destruction of the Minoan civilization by the Mycenaeans brought about its disappearance, except maybe in Cyprus.
Linear B appeared in Create around 1400–1350 BC. We know from the deciphering conducted in the 1950s by Michael Ventris and John Chadwick that it represented a primitive Greek dialect. The older continental inscriptions (Pylos, Mycenae, Thebes, etc.) date to slightly more than a century later. It disappeared with the collapse of the Mycenaean empire.
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The Phoenician Alphabet
A “Canaanite” alphabet anterior to 1200 BC was found in 1948 in the Ugarit archeological site, in northern Syria (now Ras Shamra). It is a consonantal alphabet, but it uses cuneiform signs. So, it is completely different from the Phoenician alphabet’s letters, and it didn’t grow into anything more than that. Phoenician writing appeared at an unknown date, but it is certain that it was before the 11th century BC. Indeed, around 1000 BC, all the consonants are already in place in this twenty-two-sign alphabet. Françoise Briquel-Chatonnet points out that the order of the letters “is almost contemporary of the appearance of the alphabet.”271 The famous inscription found in 1923 by Pierre Montet, the inscription engraved in the name of the king Ithobaal of Byblos (currently Jbail, north of Beiruth) on two sides of king Ahiram’s sarcophagus, dates to around 1050 BC. This inscription reads from right to left. Its dating is not entirely confirmed (another dating making it older has been suggested). Some other, shorter texts that could go as far back as the 13th and 12th centuries BC have also been found on the Syrian coast, in particular on arrowheads.
We don’t really know where the Phoenician alphabet was born. Some say Byblos, but Palestine is where the most inscriptions in 2nd millennium BC alphabetical writing have been found. This writing flourished significantly in the five former kingdoms of the Philistine plain: Gaza, Ashkalon, Ashdod, Gath and Ekron. Then in the kingdoms of Tyre, Sidon, Arwad and Byblos, located north of the Mount Carmel, on the Mediterranean coast of the Levant. Phoenician writing then spread to all the Phoenicians colonies and trading posts, including small kingdoms following the Luwian tradition from Asia minor. “The fact that a population, whose usual Indo-European language was the Luwian, used the Phoenician language has probably helped to spread and adapt the Phoenician alphabet to the Greek world,” reckons André Lemaire.272
Some people attempted to make the Phoenician writing derive from the Proto-Sinaitic writing through the intermediary of Proto-Canaanite and the Ugaritic alphabets (Maurice Dunand’s theory). Some people attempted to link it to the twenty-four “monoliteral” signs invented by the Egyptians, to which the Phoenicians supposedly attributed new phonetic values. Some people also tried to account for this writing by a simple desire to “simplify” the Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform writing or the Egyptian hieroglyphic writing. All these theories that are actually only suppositions and hardly convince anyone. On the Ugaritic alphabet, Maurice Vieyra wrote that the question at hand is to know whether it
was used as a model for the Phoenician alphabet or whether both […] represented the completion of a more ancient traditional order that was adopted by both alphabets. [But] none of the Ras Shamra alphabet’s signs derives directly or indirectly from Mesopotamian cuneiform signs, not even from marginal cuneiform syllabaries […] So it is a proper invention, not only when it comes to the creation of an alphabet, but also in the shape of the signs used by this alphabet […] This doesn’t bode well for the validity of an argument often used to try to derive the signs of Proto-Sinaitic from some Egyptians hieroglyphs.273
The same author underlines that “going from ‘Proto-Sinaitic’ signs to the letters of the Canaanite linear alphabet isn’t as easy as it seems,” especially since it “is definitely not clear historically or linguistically how the discovery would have spread from Sinai peninsula to Syria.”274 As for a desire to “simplify” the system of hieroglyphs or cuneiform signs, it seems dubious, especially since most of those signs have “no likeness with the corresponding Phoenician letters.”275
It actually seems impossible to demonstrate that the Phoenician alphabet is derived from the Sumero-Akkadian writing, the Egyptian hieroglyphs, hieratic writing or the Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions, or that it results from an effort to “simplify” an earlier system. Marcel Cohen writes that
the circumstances and the specific location (somewhere on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean) in which the alphabet was formed elude us. It most likely has a pictographic origin like the other writings. But we could not link it to some specific hieroglyphic documents from the Phoenician region; we aren’t certain that they were connected to some engraved documents found in the Sinai, from a suspicious date (between 1800 and 1500 BC), that comprised just a few signs that looked more or less like coarse drawings.276
“The linear aspect of the Phoenician alphabet’s letters is quite problematic,” observes Maurice Vieyra:
because it doesnt look like its shapes were naturally derived from known systems. Neither the cursive forms of the Egyptian hieroglyphs nor the
‘Proto-Sinaitic’ writing, which are generally considered to be its prototypes, immediately summarize the drawings that the Phoenician alphabet presents.277
Charles Higounet writes:
the purpose of all the theories was to discover the origin of the material form of the Phoenician letters. At first, people tried to directly connect those forms to the forms of simple Egyptian hieroglyphs or the forms of hieratic signs. Some other scholars thought those forms were a deformation of the cuneiform characters […] the linear Cretan antecedent was also brought up […] bringing it together with the Proto-Sinaitic writing and with the Arabic writings didn’t help because it seems that they are derived or parallel systems, not antecedents […] Finally, a last group of people argued that the Phoenician characters were made from the ground up.278
Françoise Briquel-Chatonnet brings the topic of the appearance of the alphabetical system to a close: “we must admit that it is impossible to track the historical process that resulted in the creation of this new system, or to locate the creation with precision.”279
So, the question that should then be asked is where do the letters of the Phoenician alphabet come from? Where did the Phoenicians find them? Who transmitted the letters to them?
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The Sea Peoples
The turn of the 12th century BC is not just a turning point but a dramatic shift in the history of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Near East. In the span of a few decades, at the end of the 13th and the beginning of the 12th century BC, the invasion of the Sea Peoples disrupted the whole Mediterranean Sea. Both the Mycenaean in Greece and the Hittite empire in Anatolia collapsed one after the other. Meanwhile, most principalities in the Levant and almost all the Bronze Age cultures of Cyprus ad the Syro-Palestinian coast were disrupted. The only territories that weathered the storm were far from the sea, like Upper Egypt and Mesopotamia.
Runes and the Origins of Writing Page 10