The Early Greek Alphabets Origin, Diffusion, Uses

The birth of the Greek alphabet marked a new horizon in the history of writing, as the vowelless Phoenician alphabet was borrowed and adapted to write vowels as well as consonants. Rather than creating a single unchanging new tradition, however, its earliest attestations show a very great degree of diversity, as areas of the Greek-speaking world established their own regional variants. This volume asks how, when, where, by whom and for what purposes Greek alphabetic writing developed.

Anne Jeffery's Local Scripts of Archaic Greece (1961), re-issued with a valuable supplement in 1990, was an epoch-making contribution to the study of these issues. But much important new evidence has emerged even since 1987, and debate has continued energetically about all the central issues raised by Jeffery's book: the date at which the Phoenician script was taken over and adapted to write vowels with separate signs; the priority of Phrygia or Greece in that process; the question whether the adaptation happened once, and the resulting alphabet then spread outwards, or whether similar adaptations occurred independently in several paces; if the adaptation was a single event, the region where it occurred, and the explanation for the many divergences in local script; what the scripts tell us about the regional divisions of archaic Greece. There has also been a flourishing debate about the development and functions of literacy in archaic Greece. The contributors to this volume bring a range of perspectives to bear in revisiting Jeffery's legacy, including chapters which extend the scope beyond Jeffery, by considering the fortunes of the Greek alphabet in Etruria, in southern Italy, and on coins.

Robert Parker, University of Oxford,Philippa M. Steele, University of Cambridge

Robert Parker was Fellow and Tutor in Greek and Latin Languages and Literature at Oriel College, Oxford, from 1976-1996, and Wykeham Professor of Ancient History in the University of Oxford from 1996 until retirement in 2016.

Philippa M. Steele is a Senior Research Associate at the Faculty of Classics, Cambridge, where she directs the ERC-funded project Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing Systems (CREWS, grant no. 677758). She is a Senior Research Fellow at Magdalene College, Cambridge.

1. Introduction, Robert Parker and Philippa M. Steele
Part I. Origins
2. The Genesis of the Local Alphabets of Archaic Greece, Rudolf Wachter
3. Sounds, Signs, and Boundaries, Nino Luraghi
4. Writing and Pre-Writing at Methone and Eretria, Rosalind Thomas
5. Contextualizing the Origin of the Greek Alphabet, Roger Woodard
Part II. Alphabet and Language
6. Dodona and the Concept of Local Scripts, Alan Johnston
7. The Pronunciation of Upsilon and Related Matters: A U-Turn, Julián Méndez Dosuna
8. Letter Forms and Distinctive Spellings: Date and Context of the New Festival Calendar from Arkadia, Sophie Minon
Part III. Themes and Regions
9. Local Scripts on Archaic Coins: Distribution and Function, Andrew Meadows
10. Regions within Regions: Patterns of Epigraphic Habits within Archaic Crete, James Whitley
11. New Archaic Inscriptions: Attica, the Attic-Ionic Islands of the Cyclades, and the Dorian islands, Angelos Matthaiou
12. Boeotian Inscriptions in Epichoric Script: A Conspectus, Nikolaos Papazarkadas
13. Etruria between the Iron Age and Orientalizing Period and the Adoption of Alphabetic Writing, Alessandro Naso and Enrico Benelli
14. The Greek Alphabet in South-East Italy: The Culture of Writing Between Greeks and Non-Greeks, Kathryn Lomas