20b - Greek Alphabetic Writing

Summary

The earliest surviving Greek statement about the invention of writing appears to be that of the poet Stesichorus (c. 630–555 B.C.) attributing it to Palamedes. Subsequently Hecataeus of Miletus suggested that Danaus first brought writing to Greece, from Egypt. Herodotus appears to be the first Greek who concluded that the source of Greek writing was the Semitic alphabet which (he believed) Cadmus and his Phoenicians had brought when they settled in Thebes :‘at first, the script which all Phoenicians use; then, as time went on, these descendants of Cadmus changed, with the language, the letter-shapes also. The Ionic Greeks who were then living around Boeotia learnt the letters from the Phoenicians and took them over, re-forming a few, but still called them “Phoenician letters”: φοινικηια

The order, names and shapes of the signs in the row demonstrate that the Greek alphabet from alpha to tau was indeed derived from the Semitic (fig. 104). Moreover the appellation phoinikeia for ‘letters’ is attested in Ionic, Aeolic, and Doric Cretan inscriptions. Some scholars translate this as the ‘red-painted things’; and admittedly the other two names commonly attested, γραμματα and στοιχεια (‘scratched lines’, ‘units in the row’), describe the physical aspect of an inscription; but red paint was mostly confined to letters chiselled in stone or wood, whereas to the earliest Greek learners writing probably meant what their teachers scratched on waxed tablets or potsherds, or else dark dipinti on leather or papyrus. The area which Herodotus himself called ‘Phoenicia ’ could place the Semitic ‘cradle’ anywhere from the Orontes down to the border of Palestine; but since the West Semitic script of the Phoenicians was also being used in parts of Cyprus, and by the Aramaic speakers beyond the Orontes, and by the Hebrews and Moabites in Palestine, then these areas must be included as possibilities – particularly, perhaps, the Aramaic (see above, p. 813).