This innovative series offers unique perspectives on the political, cultural, social, and economic history of the ancient world. Volumes include new editions and commentaries on ancient documents, interdisciplinary explorations of inscriptions and papyri, and thematic volumes that explore the boundaries of ancient documentary studies and offer new approaches to imaging, decipherment, and interpretation.
The Early Greek Alphabets
Origin, Diffusion, Uses
Edited by ROBERT PARKER and PHILIPPA M. STEELE
1
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In memory of L. H. Jeffery
Preface
This volume has its origin in a conference held in Oxford in 2016, ‘Archaia Grammata. The Local scripts of Archaic Greece. A conference in memory of L. H. Jeffery (1915–1986)’. The idea of commemorating Anne Jeffery, 40 years after her death, was suggested by Angelos Matthaiou. The location, Oxford, was the natural one, as this was where Jeffery completed her doctorate and taught, a much-loved figure, throughout her career. (As an undergraduate she studied in Cambridge, and had begun doctoral work there, interrupted by war work.)1 She had a consummate knowledge of the archaeological as well as the literary evidence for early Greek history and culture, displayed in many articles and most especially in her Archaic Greece: The City-States, c.700–500 B.C of 1976. Her masterpiece of 1961, The Local Scripts of Archaic Greece, was reissued in 1990 with a most valuable ‘Supplement. 1961–1987’ of 58 tight-packed pages by Alan Johnston, a contributor to the present volume. But debate has if anything intensified since Johnston’s cut-off date, and we hoped that a conference revisiting many of the main themes of Local Scripts (as that work will henceforth be styled throughout the book, an honorific exception to the author-date system otherwise used) would be timely. We have been happy to give asylum (Chapters 13 and 14) to two refugees from an earlier Oxford conference on the development of the Greek alphabet that never proceeded to publication.
Charles Crowther played a central role in planning and organizing the conference. Robert Parker acknowledges with gratitude a generous grant from the Ludwig fund of New College that covered conference expenses. Philippa Steele conducted her editorial work on this volume in her role as director of the project Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing Systems (CREWS) at Cambridge University, which has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 677758). We thank Kim Richardson for her careful copy-editing, and at the OUP especially Karen Raith, Henry Clarke and Kalpana Sagayanathan.
1 For her life and work see the obituary by D. M. Lewis, Proceedings of the British Academy 72 (1987), 505–16 (https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/73p505.pdf), with a charming photograph.
List of Figures
List of Tables
List of Contributors
1. Introduction 1
Robert Parker and Philippa M. Steele
PART I. ORIGINS
2. The Genesis of the Local Alphabets of Archaic Greece 21 Rudolf Wachter
3. Sounds, Signs, and Boundaries: Perspectives on Early Greek Alphabetic Writing 32 Nino Luraghi
4. Writing and Pre-Writing in Early Archaic Methone and Eretria
Rosalind Thomas
5. Contextualizing the Origin of the Greek Alphabet
Roger D. 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 119 Julián Méndez Dosuna
8. Letter Forms and Distinctive Spellings: Date and Context of the ‘New Festival Calendar from Arkadia’ 146 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 Doric Islands
249 Angelos P. Matthaiou
12. Boiotian Inscriptions in Epichoric Script: A Conspectus of Recent Discoveries
267 Nikolaos Papazarkadas
13. Etruria between the Iron Age and Orientalizing Period and the Adoption of Alphabetic Writing
293 Enrico Benelli and Alessandro Naso
14. The Greek Alphabet in South-East Italy: Literacy and the Culture of Writing between Greeks and Non-Greeks
Kathryn Lomas
List of Figures
4.1 Alphabetic inscribed sherds from Methone. 62
4.2 Non- or barely alphabetic inscribed sherds from Methone. 63
4.3 Inscribed sherds from Eretria, reproduced from Bessios, Tzifopoulos, and Kotsonas (2012) with the kind help of the editors. Reproduced courtesy of the Swiss School of Archaeology in Greece. 68
5.1 Silver bowl from Amathus: S. Dardel’s drawing (1876), after JHS LIII (1933), plate 1. 92
12.9 Inventory of the Archaeological Museum of Thebes, p. 234 (photo: Y. Kalliontzis).
12.10 Epigram, Museum of Thebes no. 1499 (photo: O. Kourakis). 286
13.1 Abandonment of Final Bronze Age settlements in southern Etruria.
13.2 The statues in the Tomb of the Statues near Caere.
13.3 Stone mouldings from Caere and north Syria.
13.4 Caere, the Great Tumulus II in the Banditaccia necropolis.
13.5 View from the air of the Banditaccia necropolis at Caere.
14.1 Puglia: principal archaeological sites and ethnic groups attributed by ancient sources.
14.2 Distribution of Archaic inscriptions (sixth–fifth centuries bc ). 325
14.3 Chronological distribution of Messapic inscriptions (after De Simone and Marchesini 2002).
14.4 Archaic Messapic alphabet, sixth–fifth centuries bc (after De Simone and Marchesini 2002).
14.5 Later Messapic alphabet, third century bc (after De Simone and Marchesini 2002). 332
14.6 Distribution of the Apulian alphabet. 333
List of Tables
7.1 Alternative reconstructions of the evolution of Proto-Greek *ū. 136
8.1 Letter forms synopsis c.450–400 bc (adapted from Local Scripts). 148
8.2 Palaeographical synopsis of the official inscriptions of north Arkadia c.500–350. 151
8.3 Palaeographical synopsis of the private inscriptions of north Arkadia c.500–350. 152
8.4 Palaeographical synopsis of the official inscriptions of west Arkadia (Thelphousa, Phigalia) c.500–350. 152
8.5 Palaeographical synopsis of the private inscriptions of west Arkadia c.500–350. 153
8.6 Palaeographical synopsis of the official inscriptions of Mantinea c.500–350. 154
8.7 Palaeographical synopsis of the private inscriptions of Mantinea and surrounding region c.500–350. 155
8.8 Palaeographical synopsis of the official inscriptions of Tegea and surrounding region c.500–350. 156
8.9 Palaeographical synopsis of the private inscriptions of Tegea and surrounding region c.500–350. 157
8.10 A relative chronology for a more precise dating of the new inscription. 158
8.11 Summary of the evidence for labiovelars and palatalizations. 163
9.1 Whole-word legends on Archaic Greek coinage. 201
9.2 All electrum and silver issues of the Archaic period that can be attributed to a people or a person. 203
10.1 Types of dedication in Crete, 700–450 bc , as counted in 1997. 229
10.2 Types of inscriptions in Crete, 700–450 bc , as counted in 2016. 231
10.3 Legal fragments in relation to actual inscribed laws in Crete. 232
10.4 Comparison between number of inscriptions from the Athenian Agora and those from Azoria. 235
10.5 Dates of inscriptions from Azoria, Praisos, and Itanos. 239
10.6 Language of inscriptions from Azoria, Praisos, and Itanos. 239
10.7 Types of inscription from Azoria, Praisos, and Itanos. 239
10.8 Types of inscription from West, Central, and East Crete. 240
List of Contributors
Enrico Benelli is a Researcher in the Institute for Studies on the Mediterranean in the Italian National Research Council (CNR); from 2004 he has been the editor of the Thesaurus Linguae Etruscae and the Corpus Inscriptionum Etruscarum. He was Working Group Leader in the COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) Action ‘Ancient European Languages and Writings’ (AELAW) from 2015 to 2019.
Alan Johnston is Emeritus Reader in Classical Archaeology at University College London. He prepared for publication the revised edition of Local Scripts of Archaic Greece and continues to work on such material. Currently he is also engaged in the British Museum on republication of the pottery excavated at Naukratis and completing a catalogue of the amphora stamps in the collection.
Kathryn Lomas is Honorary Research Fellow in Ancient History at the University of Durham. Her main research interests are in the history and archaeology of pre-Roman and Roman Italy, and in cultural identities in the ancient world. Her most recent publication is The Rise of Rome: From the Iron Age to the Punic Wars, 1000–264 BC (London, 2017).
Nino Luraghi is Wykeham Professor of Ancient History at the University of Oxford. He has worked mostly on Greek ethnicity and on tyrants in ancient Greece. He is currently engaged in a project on the political culture of early Hellenistic Athens.
Angelos P. Matthaiou is the secretary general of the Greek Epigraphic Society, editor in chief of the journal ΗΟΡΟΣ (1983–) and director of the journal Γραμματεῖον (2012–). Ηis research interests are in Greek Epigraphy and Attic Topography. His latest publication is Ἕξι Ἀττικὲς ἐπιγραφὲς τοῦ 4ου αἰ. π.Χ. (Athens, 2019).
Andrew Meadows is Fellow and Tutor in Ancient History at New College Oxford, Director of the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents in the Faculty of Classics, and an Honorary Curator at the Ashmolean Museum. He is currently the Principal Investigator of the joint AHRC-ANR-MINECO-funded project ARCH (Ancient Coinage as Related Cultural Heritage) and of the ERC-funded project CHANGE (The development of the monetary economy of ancient Anatolia, c.630–30 bc).
Julián Méndez Dosuna is Professor of Greek Linguistics at the University of Salamanca. His most recent research revolves around the ancient Greek dialects, with a particular focus on the lead tablets from Dodona, ‘irrational polysemy’, and sexual metaphors in Aristophanes.
Sophie Minon is Directeur d’études in Ancient Greek Dialectology at Ecole pratique des Hautes études, Paris Sciences Lettres, laboratoire AnHiMa. She is co-director with Robert Parker and Markus Egetmeyer of the ANR-2017 Project LGPN-Ling: Etymological and semantic analysis of ancient Greek personal names: electronic and printed dictionary. Her
main research interests are in ancient Greek linguistics and especially semantics applied to onomastics; she published Les inscriptions éléennes dialectales (VIe–IIe siècle avant J.-C.), Vol. 1: Textes; Vol. 2: Grammaire et vocabulaire institutionnel (Geneva, 2007) and recently co-edited with A. Alonso Déniz, L. Dubois, Cl. Le Feuvre, and with the participation of Ed. Chiricat, La suffixation des anthroponymes grecs antiques (Geneva, 2017).
Alessandro Naso was Full Professor in Prehistory and Protohistory at the LeopoldFranzens-University Innsbruck (2008–14) and Director of the Institute for Ancient Mediterranean Studies, National Research Council of Italy (2014–18). From 2015 he has been Professor for Etruscology and Italic Antiquities at the University Federico II Naples. He edited Etruscology (Berlin and Boston, MA, 2017).
Nikolaos Papazarkadas is the Nicholas C. Petris Professor of Greek Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the Director of the Sara B. Aleshire Center for the Study of Greek Epigraphy and one of the senior editors of Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum. He is currently preparing, in collaboration with a team of international scholars, a new edition of the epigraphic corpus of Boiotia, Inscriptiones Graecae VII.2.
Robert Parker is Wykeham Professor Emeritus of Ancient History at the University of Oxford. His main research interests are in Greek religion and epigraphy; his latest book is Greek Gods Abroad: Names, Natures and Transformations (Oakland, 2017).
Philippa M. Steele is a Senior Research Associate of the Faculty of Classics and Senior Research Fellow of Magdalene College, University of Cambridge. She is Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded Horizon 2020 project ‘Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing Systems’ (CREWS, grant no. 677758) and her main interests are in the languages and writing systems of the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean in the second and first millennia bc . Her recent book Writing and Society in Ancient Cyprus (Cambridge, 2018) completes a trilogy on Cypriot languages and scripts.
Rosalind Thomas is Fellow in Ancient History at Balliol College, Oxford, and Professor of Greek History, University of Oxford. She is author of Oral Tradition and Written Record in Classical Athens (CUP, 1989), Literacy and Orality in Ancient Greece (CUP, 1992), and Herodotus in Context: Ethnography, Science and the Art of Persuasion (CUP, 2000). Apart from literacy, her main areas of research include Greek law, ethnicity, Greek historiography, and intellectual history. Her most recent work examines ‘local histories’ as a cultural and political phenomenon: Polis Histories, Collective Memories and the Greek World (CUP, 2019).
Rudolf Wachter is Professor of Greek, Latin, and Indo-European Historical Linguistics at the Universities of Basel and Lausanne. His recent publications include Pompejanische Wandinschriften (Tusculum series, Berlin, 2019) and articles on the early history of the alphabet in the Near East (Theologische Zeitschrift 74, 2018, 69–87), dyslexia in a prominent Attic vase painter (in: Töpfer—Maler—Schreiber: Inschriften auf attischen Vasen, Kilchberg, 2016, 141–52), and the etymology of the name Persephone (Die Sprache 47, 2007–8, fasc. 2 [2010], 163–81).
James Whitley is Professor of Mediterranean Archaeology at Cardiff University. His main research interests lie in the archaeology of early Iron Age and Archaic Greece; his latest
book (co-edited with Lisa Nevett) is An Age of Experiment: Classical Archaeology Transformed (1976–2014) (Cambridge, 2018). Between 2002 and 2007 he was Director of the British School at Athens.
Roger D. Woodard is the Andrew van Vranken Raymond Professor of the Classics at the University of Buffalo (The State University of New York). His chief research interests are in Greek philology and Indo-European myth and religion. His latest book is The Textualization of the Greek Alphabet (Cambridge, 2014).
1 Introduction
Robert Parker and Philippa M. Steele
Regional variation was a persistent feature of Greek alphabetic writing throughout the Archaic period. Although direct testimony is scarce, we have good reason to believe that the Greeks were well aware of local variations in the repertoires, sign shapes, and sign values of their alphabets; there is clear evidence that they were able not only to maintain those alphabetic distinctions, but also to exploit them and use them to emphasize social and political boundaries.1 Modern scholarship has sought to impose a taxonomical system on the distribution of Archaic Greek dialects, perhaps most famously and most literally in the colour-coded map published by Adolf Kirchhoff in the nineteenth century that still dominates the terminology we use today (the green, red, light-blue, and dark-blue alphabets, on which see further below).2
When Lilian H. (Anne) Jeffery, to whom the present work is dedicated, began her study of the Archaic Greek alphabets she was in one sense building on a by then well-established scholarly tradition that sought to categorize the alphabets, and to use their variant features to understand better the transmission of alphabetic writing from the Phoenicians (a ‘fact’ that was itself well entrenched in Greek thought, where the alphabet was referred to as phoinikeia grammata).3 While Jeffery’s contribution considerably furthered such ongoing conversations, her greatest legacy is to be found in her working methods: rather than accept the state of knowledge as it then was, she embarked on an ambitious survey of more than a thousand inscriptions, which she viewed first-hand. By conducting her own autopsy, photography, and drawing of each text,4 she established the basis for a study that far surpassed those of earlier scholarship, as realized in her 1961 publication of The Local Scripts of Archaic Greece in which she not only engaged with theoretical approaches to alphabetic developments but also, and more importantly, laid out detailed discussions of the features of alphabetic writing region by region across the Greek-speaking world. The 1990 second edition, updated to
1 Luraghi (2010); see also Johnston (2012). 2 Kirchhoff (1887).
3 See for example Roberts (1887) and Carpenter (1933).
4 It is worth mentioning here another woman scholar working roughly around the same time as Jeffery: Margherita Guarducci, whose approach to publishing the epigraphic record of Crete in her Inscriptiones Creticae volumes followed similar standards (which sadly have seldom been embraced by others publishing local Greek epigraphic corpora).
include subsequent finds and scholarship with a supplement by Alan Johnston, remains the seminal treatment of the Archaic Greek alphabets to which all modern studies owe a considerable debt. That debt will, we hope, be obvious in the range and nature of contributions to the present volume.
A. History and Functions
I. How, When, Where, by Whom, and for What Purpose?
‘The adoption of the alphabet by the Greeks: how, when, where, by whom, and for what purpose?’: that (translated) title of an earlier paper by one contributor to this volume sums up a cluster of issues around which many of the present papers revolve.5 To start with ‘when?’, the idea that the alphabet might have reached Greece centuries before the first surviving evidence was devastatingly attacked in 1933 by Carpenter,6 whom Jeffery7 and all the contributors to this volume follow; no one shows sympathy for the revival of that position, by Naveh and others, who argued that the Greek letter forms reflect earlier stages in the history of West Semitic lettering and must date to around the eleventh century.8 ‘Somewhere close to 800’ is the consensus here, though Woodard suggests going a quarter of a century or so earlier. Absolute precision will never be possible, because as Wachter points out it is unlikely that the scraps of early writing that chance to survive take us back to the very moment of invention—although he also argues that previous models have probably greatly overestimated the time it could take for an invention such as the alphabet to be communicated from one part of the Mediterranean or another (a matter of ‘a few weeks rather than months or years’). A little discouragingly, Wachter also writes, ‘The alphabet we find in the inscriptions of some region is surely not the Greek “Uralphabet” or “prototype alphabet”; it is not even likely to be the first variant of alphabet used there. We can be sure that in the beginning of writing in any particular place there were lots of individual experiments of which we will never know.’ This was a new technology, sometimes seen as the creation of a single inspired individual or community who saw the possibility of adapting the Phoenician alphabet for Greek use, which spread like wildfire because of its manifest utility through most regions. So our situation is as if we were seeking to recover the proto-history of the internet from evidence beginning, let us say, in the year of publication of this book. It should also be remembered that the Greek alphabet was not an isolated development, and that very similar alphabetic writing (featuring the key shared innovation of the same five vowel
5 Wachter (1998). 6 Carpenter (1933).
7 Local Scripts, 12–21; supported against Naveh in Local Scripts. Supplement, 426–27.
8 On this debate see most recently Waal (2018), (2019).
signs) appeared in Phrygia and Italy around the same time, and in fact some of these attestations are dated slightly earlier than the first surviving Greek alphabetic inscriptions (second half of the ninth and first half of the eighth century respectively). Janko’s recent re-evaluation of early alphabetic inscriptions of Greece, Italy, and Phrygia seeks to raise the standard Aegean chronology for this period and places the beginnings of the Greek alphabet in the mid-ninth century;9 such attempts to revise Mediterranean chronologies, however, are not uncontroversial.10
The question of ‘how?’ is multi-faceted. One aspect is the debate between believers in single or multiple takeover: was the West Semitic alphabet transformed into the Greek, by the addition of vowels, just once (all subsequent divergences from the prototype occurring by internal development within Greece), or do the Greek local scripts vary in part because several distinct adaptations of the Semitic alphabet had occurred? There is near consensus in this volume in favour of a single takeover. The most emphatic unitarian is Wachter, who once engagingly supposed the Greek alphabet to have been born when an unusually brilliant Greek or Greeks met with Phoenicians ‘at a little party on a pleasant summer evening’ (1989, 37).11 But whereas Wachter’s Greeks and Phoenicians go their separate ways after that momentous encounter, Luraghi argues that contact must have been maintained for longer. Luraghi supports a ‘modified version of the single-adaptation theory’. While one popular argument for single adaptation (the supposed arbitrariness of the relation between the Greek vowels and the Phoenician graphemes used to represent them) has lost its force, another has emerged, if we allow that more of the familiar Greek letters are new creations, not adaptations of the Phoenician, than has often been supposed: ‘the more we recognize the significant differences between all known West Semitic alphabets of the relevant period and all known Greek alphabets, the less the multiple independent adaptations theory is conceivable’. But, he argues against Wachter, the creation of the Greek alphabet must have been a process that took time and careful analysis, not the happy improvisation of a genius in an idle moment. The gap between speech and writing in any language whatsoever is such that learning to write, even when the conventions are fully established, is always a protracted process: how much harder to create such conventions for the first time, starting from an alphabet shaped to the needs of a different language. A next step in his argument depends partly on accepting four controversial copper plaques supposedly found in the Fayum as genuine.12 These much-analysed documents apparently attest a
9 See Janko (2015). 10 See e.g. Fantalkin, Finkelstein, and Piasetzky (2011).
11 Cf. below p. 25: ‘I continue to imagine, for this invention to have been made, no more than one or two Greeks, preferably traders far from home, sitting together with a Phoenician who told them about the use of script for writing letters, order lists, short memoranda, etc., and then taught them the series of letter names and passed on to them an abecedarium.’
12 On these items, see Woodard (2014).
proto-Greek alphabet lacking all the supplemental letters added at the end of the Phoenician, not just ΦΧΨ which are absent from some local Greek alphabets but even the crucial new vowel Υ. If a proto-alphabet existed without Υ, which as a shape is generally held to derive from Phoenician waw, the interaction between the two alphabets was not confined to a single moment.13 The point survives, even if the Fayum plaques are discounted, if we accept (but Wachter would not14) that some of the other supplementary letters are reshapings of Phoenician letters, requiring a ‘second wave of adaptation’ (and one where, presumably, there is a more distant relationship between shape and value of sign). ‘We can speak of a tradition, and need to think in terms of individuals who were the carriers of such tradition: scribes may be a reductive term, but would be one of the least misleading ways to characterize them.’
Though for Wachter the creation of the alphabet is almost instantaneous, he is much in agreement on the importance of tradition or traditions for its diffusion. Crucial here are the hypothesized alphabet jingles, oral manifestations of the ‘well-defined sequence of letters that the literate members of a community have learnt and are able to reproduce at any moment in their lives’, attested for us by the abecedaria surviving from many but unfortunately not all regions. Having learnt the jingle, the student then learns the sounds indicated by the names (and suggested by their first letters), and finally is taught to combine letters into syllables and words. All this implies a tradition of teaching15 and one that is strongly integrated into the transmission of the alphabet from person to person and from place to place. On the other hand, Benelli in this volume questions the importance of alphabetic training as a vehicle for the transmission of the script, seeing the variability of some early local scripts and especially the coexistence of scripts with different repertoires in some areas (his primary focus is on the Etruscan material) as indicating that standardized teaching was a secondary rather than a primary development. There may have been regional differences in this regard, as writing was learnt for different purposes and incorporated into different local traditions—in the case of Etruria, for instance, growing up within the context of local elite practices such as gift exchange (as argued by Benelli in this volume).16
13 Wachter (1989) 40 sought to deny the inference by the suggestion that, if genuine, the tablets are the work of Greeks practising the Phoenician alphabet but using the Greek letter shapes that were more familiar to them.
14 ‘Not a single one of the subsequent changes to the alphabet, not even of the earliest ones, needs a Near Eastern source or inspiration.’
15 An attempt at an English equivalent for the concept of ‘corpus dottrinale’ developed by Prosdocimi (1989) 1326–28 and (1990) 188–94; cf. too Lejeune (1989) 1289: ‘il n’ y a pas emprunt d’une écriture sans emprunt de la pédagogie qui la sert’.
16 It has been argued by Maras (forthcoming) that the epigraphic reflexes of gift exchange have their origins in a longstanding tradition that must have predated local literacy.
To the interconnected questions ‘where?’ and ‘by whom?, Jeffery answered (Local Scripts, 11), with due caution, ‘possibly at Al Mina in North Syria’ by Greek traders. In this volume, only Woodard attempts anything like so precise an answer. He believes, on philological grounds, that the Phoenician script was adapted for Greek by Greeks from Cyprus, and that the chain of transmission then went through East Ionians to West Ionians. He thus looks for a scenario in which ‘literate Cypriot and non-literate East Ionian Greeks are co-operatives in an undertaking in which acquisition of at least basic literacy is advantageous to East Ionians’, and proposes a concrete (and interestingly early!) context: ‘Assyrian military expeditions into Syria-Palestine and Anatolia in the ninth century bc , perhaps particularly the campaigns of Shalmaneser III, who ruled 858–824 bc’, in which East Ionians would have served alongside Phoenicians as mercenaries.17 The busy Euboeans, well known to have been active at both ends of the Mediterranean, then become the obvious candidates to have carried the new technology westwards. This postulate of Cypriot middlemen has obvious attractions, and faces (philological issues aside) one obvious difficulty. Positively, Greek language is attested on Cyprus as early as the tenth century, and the presence of Phoenician settlement there by the ninth century gives further opportunities for contact between Greek and Phoenician speakers in approximately the right timeframe. Greek was written there, it is true, in the inherited syllabary, not the alphabet of the future, but nevertheless such writing shows that Cypriots understood potential uses of literacy. Negatively, it becomes a puzzle why the new Cypriot invention, if such it was, had to wait another half millennium before becoming predominant in its place of origin.18 Luraghi might have sympathy for Woodard’s location (minus the Cypriot thesis), but just as one possibility among several. He thinks merely of a locale somewhere on the margins of the Greek world, where a mixed population of Greeks interacted with speakers and scribes of other languages: mercenary service in one of the Near Eastern armies would provide an appropriate context. Wachter by contrast regards the question of ‘where?’ as unanswerable in principle, because, as mentioned above, the very earliest stages escape us and the new technology surely spread very quickly, leaving no trail behind it. He denies that we need to think of a mixed settlement: ‘I therefore prefer the notion of a rather casual meeting of some Greek and Phoenician traders in any Mediterranean harbour.’
The question ‘what for?’ is most fully addressed in this volume by Thomas. She comes at it from a distinctive angle, and one barely available to Jeffery, given that the relevant material has almost all been very recently discovered. In Iliad 7 (170–89),
17 The currently prevalent view that Greeks regularly served as mercenaries in Assyrian and Babylonian armies has been strongly contested by Fantalkin and Lytle (2016).
18 So Jeffery, Local Scripts, 7–8. On the progress of the use of the alphabet in Cyprus, see Steele (2018) chapter 5.
when a choice has to be made of a Greek champion to confront Hector, the candidates all mark a ‘lot’ (a potsherd?) with a σῆμα (a sign or mark) and the lots are put in Agamemnon’s helmet: this is then shaken, and the one that comes out first is shown to the heroes in turn; they ‘fail to recognize’ it until it comes to Ajax who rejoices to see his own σῆμα. Thus written marks can signify ownership even among the illiterate, and it is this phenomenon that Thomas discusses on the basis of the very recently discovered and now quite abundant eighth-century graffiti from Methone (all or almost all in the Eretrian alphabet) and the sanctuary of Apollo Daphnephoros at Eretria. Both these contexts have revealed a small number of examples of true writing (mostly names), more of single letters of the alphabet or non-alphabetic marks; but the latter very likely indicate ownership (being often positioned in the places on vessels where undeniable ownership inscriptions occur). Two possibilities are open: the use of σῆματα prepares the ground for writing, which does the same job with more precision; alternatively, non-writers imitate writers by use of distinctive marks. Either way, the two practices coexist; and we see the first writing/pre-writing/para-writing used in a practical, commercial context (in both cases by Euboeans).19 The ‘literary’ use in the famous Nestor cup from Pithecousai is therefore an outlier, and we need not infer a highly sophisticated symposium culture at Methone from the marks on drinking vessels found there (the Hakesander cup from Methone providing the only clear parallel for Nestor’s cup). ‘It is highly misleading’, she reminds us, ‘to talk in blanket terms of “extensive literacy” deduced from evidence of the writing of individual letters or short words (as at Methone).’ A surprise is that the ‘Apollo Daphnephoros’ material (if indeed that material derives from the sanctuary) contains only one possible allusion to a god; on this showing, naming the recipient of an offering was not one of the very first uses of literacy. But, if so, the new technique was soon reapplied for that function: the well-known mass of early material from the sanctuary of Zeus on M. Hymettos will soon be joined by that from his sanctuary on M. Parnes, perhaps beginning a little earlier, the publication of which Matthaiou foretells in this volume.
II. The One and the Many
If we accept, as most contributors do, that the alphabet was taken over only once, whence came all the varieties so magisterially catalogued by Jeffery? Wachter distinguishes two main kinds of change: changes in letter forms, which could be products of adjustments by individuals which then caught on within a region and might migrate beyond it, and changes in the actual alphabet (addition of a letter;
19 Such also seems to be the working assumption of Wachter.
dropping of a letter; reuse of a letter with new sound value), which must be seen as conscious reforms; these, unlike the former, changed the character of a given alphabet as a system for representing sounds. The abecedaria are the main witnesses to these more radical forms of change. Particularly diagnostic are the fortunes of the supplementary letters not present in the Phoenician alphabet but added in Greece at the end, especially ΦΧΨ: it was indeed primarily on the basis of the presence or absence of these symbols, and the varying sound values assigned to them, that Kirchhoff devised a now largely superseded colour-coded map of Greek alphabets which divided them into ‘southern’ or green (Thera, Melos, Anaphe, Crete), ‘western’ or red (most of mainland Greece, Euboea, and Euboean colonies), and ‘eastern’, subdivided into light and dark blue (light: Attica and some Ionic islands; dark: Corinth, Argos, Ionia and some Ionic islands, Knidos).20 Kirchhoff’s schema was descriptive, not genetic (though the ‘green’ alphabets are often seen as ‘primitive’, since they lack the supplemental letters). But Wachter in this volume uses this kind of evidence to present a genetic model for the relation of the alphabets of Attica, Euboea, and eastern Greece. The changes involved must have occurred, he argues, very quickly, because once writers in large numbers had learnt one form of script they would not readily go over to another, but would cling, as does the anglophone world, to now useless graphic conventions. This raises the question of the extent and nature of literacy among early alphabetic writers, which is also addressed in a different way in Whitley’s contribution.
Luraghi’s main concern by contrast is with letter forms. He points out that the emergence of the many local scripts is roughly contemporary with the breakdown of the homogeneous middle geometric pottery style into at least twelve regional schools. What happens is primarily not, he stresses, the invention of new local graphemes, but rather the putting of existing graphemes to new local uses. The consensus had always been that variations arose through a mixture of innovation (tidying up, clarification) and simple error on the part of individuals, taken up by pupils and imitators. In 2010 Luraghi argued by contrast that communities or regions deliberately varied their alphabets, in ways that met no linguistic need, as a means of differentiation from their neighbours.21 He pointed inter alia to single inscriptions of which different parts are inscribed, probably by the same hand, in different scripts (e.g. a dedication in the dedicator’s native script plus a sculptor’s signature in the sculptor’s): such conscious ‘digraphy’ proves sensitivity to the importance of these distinctions as identity markers. A new example (a monument created by a Parian sculptor for the monument of a dead Samian) is discussed by Matthaiou in this volume. Already c.700 a lekythos bears a digraphic (Euboean/Corinthian) abecedarium. In the second part of his contribution to the
