Re: How old is the Greek Alphabet?

On Dec 11, 5:08 pm, Jack Linthicum <jacklinthi...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
The email address is legit

I have been reading several sources on the age at which the Greek
alphabet was developed. Are there any 21st century publications that
would provide new information on such questions as whether the
Cadmeian version of the alphabet has been found in the recent
excavations at Thebes?

Tradition has Cadmus giving the alphabet several generations before
the Trojan War, thus overlapping with the use of Linear B, but I have
seen nothing physical to confirm or deny this belief.

The best guess remains ca. 800 BCE. Attempts to push it back several
centuries on epigraphic grounds haven't withstood scrutiny; a telling
fact is that various pottery sequences remain quite uniform for quite
a while, and before that point they don't have inscriptions (either
formal or scratched in), and after, they do.

Probably still the most recent book is Barry B. Powell's (Cambridge,
ca. 1990) -- it includes editions of all the earliest materials -- but
his notion that the Greek alphabet was devised specifically for the
purpose of writing down Homer is just silly.
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: How old is the Greek alphabet?
    ... Cadmeian version of the alphabet has been found in the recent ... Crete where it can be observed how the Phoenician symbols became the ... Greek ones. ... Phoenician alphabet, and many scholars agree with this as well. ...
    (sci.archaeology)
  • Re: Pearls before Swine: Medieval wonders come to Los Angeles
    ... name dark ages too eg in China and Ancient Greece but these don't seem ... Homer and Hesiod. ... the time between Linear-B and Homerian Greek script. ... Re invention of the alphabet: Wouldn't you think that a society ...
    (soc.history.medieval)
  • Re: How old is the Greek alphabet?
    ... Cadmeian version of the alphabet has been found in the recent ... Greek ones. ... Phoenician alphabet, and many scholars agree with this as well. ... My basic problem with all the ideas of some kind of linear spread of ideas it assumes there was such a thing AND that it rarely takes human lifetimes into account. ...
    (sci.archaeology)
  • Re: new book on the spread of IE
    ... had 24 letters that served also as numerals. ... There is simply no alphabet in the entire history of ... as numerals, as happened in Greek and, later, in Gothic. ... it's not the very first Greek alphabet. ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: How old is the Greek alphabet?
    ... which the Greek alphabet was developed. ... observed how the Phoenician symbols became the Greek ... from 1000-800 BCE on Crete. ...
    (sci.archaeology)