The Greek Alphabet: New Evidence

The Greek Alphabet: New EvidenceAuthor(s): Joseph NavehSource: The Biblical Archaeologist, Vol. 43, No. 1 (Winter, 1980), pp. 22-25Published by: The American Schools of Oriental ResearchStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3209749 .

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The GREEK

NEW EVIDENCE

?VA "1

AOO

1 P 9 q yII

Y ?v

I 4 " x

Early Greek letter forms.

Joseph Naveh

For years, scholars of Greek and Canaanite epigraphy have tried to determine the circumstances surrounding the adoption of the Canaanite alphabet by the Greeks. Now a recent reevaluation of the evidence has led one prominent epigrapher to push back the traditional date of this occurrence by 350 years.

The Greek alphabet developed from West Semitic writing, but when this occured is disputable. A date of ca. 750 B.C. has been widely accepted since Rhys Carpenter's study (1933) "The Antiquity of the Greek Alphabet." Recent progress in the research into the early evolution of the West Semitic alphabet (Cross 1967), however, has to affect our dating of the Greek alphabet. I published (1973) a short paper suggesting that the adoption of the alphabet by the Greeks must have taken place ca. 1100 B.C.

The Semitic alphabet was born in Canaan in the 17th or 16th century B.C. Now called Proto-Canaanite, it was a pictographic-acrophonic writing con- sisting of 27 signs. Each was a pictograph representing the first consonant of the picture's name, e.g., the picture of a house, bet in Canaanite, stood for b. Later, the pictographs developed into linear letter-forms. Already in the 13th century B.C. the 27 consonantal signs had been reduced to 22, but the pictographic conception continued into the mid-Ilth century B.c. This means that until ca. 1050 B.c. the letter stances were not stabilized and the direction of writing was not yet fixed. Although writing in vertical columns disappeared in the late 12th century, both the horizontal left-to- right or right-to-left directions and horizontal boustrophedon (writing alternate lines in opposite directions) still existed until the mid-I lith century.

22 BIBLICAL ARCHEOLOGIST/ WINTER 1980



In the second half of the 1 lth century B.C. the changes became so marked that this alphabet is conventionally distinguished from the Proto-Canaanite by the name "Phoenician." In the Phoenician alphabet from that time on, there were 22 linear letters with stabilized stances which were written only in right-to-left lines. From the beginning of the first millennium B.C., cursive letter-forms evolved, which began to affect their lapidary counterparts. By the mid-8th century the Phoenician alphabet had developed a uniform script with cursive and lapidary styles.

Although the earliest Greek inscriptions known today belong to the 8th century B.C., the character- istics of the archaic Greek script recall the late Proto-Canaanite rather than the 8th-century Phoenician script. Like Proto-Canaanite, the archaic Greek alphabet was a lapidary script; the direction of writing was in horizontal lines either from right to left, or from left to right, or in horizontal boustrophedon, and the letter stances were not stabilized. All these traits indicate a pictographic conception. Moreover, some letters still preserved the Proto-Canaanite pictographic forms: e.g., the omicron with a central dot equals the Proto- Canaanite cayin, i.e., the pictograph of an eye with the pupil; the mu of five strokes of the same length resembles the pictographic mem designating water. The archaic Greek alphabet used the 22 West Semitic letters-some of them for designation of vowels-and invented 5 supplementary letters. The form of the first supplementary letter, Y, seems to be borrowed from the 10th-century Phoenician waw. Most of the archaic Greek letters, however, resemble the Proto-Canaanite letters of ca. 1100 B.c. Therefore, it is difficult to believe that the Greeks adopted the developed Phoenician script in the 8th century and turned it into a less-developed writing system, just as it was used by the ancestors of the Phoenicians 300 or 400 years before. It is more reasonable to assume that the Greeks borrowed the Proto- Canaanite alphabet ca. 1100 B.C.

1500 13th century 1200 12th century 11 th century 1000

4 A > K

u

17 7

9 __ z y

H X I --3

(t9 X

- SG 6J

00 oo O O

F ? ?4- 4 X

BIBLICAL ARCHEOLOGIST/ WINTER 1980 23



The ostracon from Izbet Sarta.

A fragmentary stele from Sardinia (CIS I, 145).

The only epigraphic difficulty with this theory is the form of the archaic Greek kappa. It does not resemble the Proto-Canaanite kap, but the 9th-century Phoenician kap. I have suggested that the Greek kappa was a later adoption because the original Proto-Canaanite kap was used for khi. This interpretation is supported by the double adoption of the waw. The original Proto- Canaanite waw was used in Greek for the consonant vau (later developed into the digamma). During the 10th century, when the Greeks invented the vowel signs and needed a letter for u, they turned to the Phoenician script and reused the waw as an upsilon (Naveh 1973: 7-8).

Even if this explanation of the origin of the kappa is wrong, it hardly refutes the whole theory of an early adoption of the alphabet by the Greeks. True, this theory is based solely on epigraphic comparisofis and ignores such issues as the "argument from silence"-the Homeric question and the first attested date of the Olympic games-and the presence of a bilingual environment where the actual transmission could have taken place. Nevertheless, the epigraphic issue is paramount.

I have suggested (1973: 8) that during quite a long period only a few Greeks used the new writing (perhaps in Crete and possibly Thera, where the most archaic letter-forms were preserved), while later it spread to the Greek mainland and other islands. Today we have two finds which may be helpful in determining the place where the Greeks adopted the alphabet.

F. M. Cross (1974) drew attention to the oldest West Semitic inscription found in the Western Mediterranean. This is a fragmentary stele from Nora in Sardinia.

Nora . . . has produced two archaic inscriptions, the famous Nora Stone of the ninth century B.C. and a fragmentary stele which has received little attention. The latter was first published in 1890 arid later in the Corpus Inscriptionum Semiti- carum [I, No. 145] upside down leading to confusion which has prevented recog- nition of its antiquity and its proper

24 BIBLICAL ARCHEOLOGIST/ WINTER 1980



decipherment. The inscription is written in boustrophedon, the first line from right to left, the second from left to right, a practice which died out in Phoenician scribal circles towards the middle of the eleventh century B.C.

It reads sinistrograde: ]'n . pC/[, and dextrograde: ]It . ht[. In the first sinistrograde line, one can read 'in p5ccl or '~n pocal which means "there is no one to do" or "there is no deed." Cross dates this fragment to the I Ith century. The boustrophedal writing and the letter forms, mainly the cayin with a point in its center and the box-shaped het (which are well known also in the archaic Greek alphabet), corroborate the assumption that this fragment bears late Proto- Canaanite letters. At any rate, we must now reckon with a Canaanite or Phoenician settlement in Sardinia from the I Ith century B.C.

The second item is more intriguing but, for the present, should be regarded with considerable reservation. This is an ostracon (9 x 11 cm) which was found recently in Israel at a small site named Izbet Sarta, ca. 18 km northeast of Tel- Aviv and 3 km east of Tell Aphek (Antipatris in the Roman period). The excavator, M. Kochavi, discov- ered an ancient unfortified settlement from ca. 1200 to 1000 B.C., roughly covering the period of the Judges. Kochavi believes that Izbet Sarta was an Israelite settlement near biblical Eben-ezer, which is described in I Samuel 4 as the gathering point of the Israelites before their battle against the Philistines who were assembled at Aphek.

The ostracon contains more than 80 late Proto-Canaanite letters shallowly incised. The main line is an abecedary, but the decipherment of the other four lines is very difficult. Although most of the letters can be identified with certainty, it is difficult to tell in what direction they were written. The letters of the abecedary are larger than the others. All are by the same hand, though apparently the scribe used different instruments. It seems clear that the abecedary was the first line of writing. Therefore, we may reckon that the abecedary was written from right to left, or

downwards in a vertical column. As no text has been discerned so far in the other lines, their direction could not be fixed.

Kochavi (1977) and Demsky (1977) wrote separate articles on this ostracon. Both believe the sherd was inscribed by an Israelite in the period of the Judges, and more precisely in the 12th century B.c. Demsky suggests further that the pe-cayin order occurring in the abecedary might have been an early Israelite innovation which survived into later biblical times in the alphabetic acrostic of Lamentations 2, 3, and 4. This suggestion, however, cannot be substantiated because the pe-cayin order at Izbet Sarta simply may indicate confusion, since zayin and het also are reversed. There are further mistakes in the abecedary: the writer confused the forms of bet and lamed, as well as qop and re'. The shapes of some other letters (e.g., the waw) do not follow what we know of the Proto-Canaanite tradition. More- over, the remaining four lines apparently do not comprise any meaningful Semitic text.

Now, if we consider this ostracon as a late Proto-Canaanite inscription, we must regard it as the scratching of some semiliterate person who, after unsuccessfully writing the abecedary, merely practiced writing various letters. The abecedary may indicate that the writer was a Canaanite student learning how to write. If so, he was surely a bad pupil. In this case, in lines 2-5 there is no text, merely an agglomeration of letters.

Both Kochavi and Demsky" pointed out that some letters occurring in this ostracon are very similar to the archaic Greek alphabet. Demsky even tried to remove the obstacle of the kap in my thesis for an early adoption of the alphabet by the Greeks because the kap in the Izbet Sarta ostracon has a long leg which, in his opinion, might be the prototype of the Greek kappa. I do not share this view and even question whether the writer of this ostracon was a speaker of a Semitic language (Naveh 1978).

There is a faint possibility that the ostracon from Izbet Sarta was

written by a Philistine. The origin of the Philistines is still obscure, but there is a scholarly consensus that they came to Egypt and Canaan in the late 13th century with the migration of some other peoples, the collective name of which is the Sea Peoples. According to the OT (Amos 9:7; Jer 47:4), the Philistines came from Caphtor, which is generally identified with Crete. In Canaan they lived mainly in five cities, three of which were on the Mediterranean coast. Philistine pottery produced in Canaan is decorated in a style similar to the Mycenean decorated ware.

The hypothesis that the Izbet Sarta ostracon was written by a Philistine can be tested by an attempt to decipher the so-far unread four lines. If these lines form a text in some dialect used in the Aegean area, there would be some basis for the assumption that the Proto-Canaanite alphabet was transmitted to the Greeks through the Philistines who had settled in the Canaanite coastal area. As yet, this is only a hypothesis, but further progress with the decipherment of the Izbet Sarta inscription and future discoveries of alphabetic inscriptions in the general area should help to resolve the outstanding issues.

Bibliography Carpenter, R.

1933 The Antiquity of the Greek Alphabet. American Journal of Archaeology 37: 8-29.

Cross, F. M. 1967 The Origin and the Early Evolution of

the Alphabet. Eretz-Israel 8: 8*-27*. 1974 Leaves from an Epigraphic Notebook.

Catholic Biblical Quarterly 36: 490-93. Demsky, A.

1977 A Proto-Canaanite Abecedary Dating from the Period of the Judges and its Implications for the History of the Alphabet. Tel-Aviv 4: 14-27.

Kochavi, M. 1977 An Ostracon of the Period of the

Judges from Izbet Sartah. Tel-Aviv 4: 1-13.

Naveh, J. 1973 Some Semitic Epigraphical Consider-

ations on the Antiquity of the Greek Alphabet. American Journal of Ar- chaeology 77: 1-8.

1978 Some Considerations on the Ostracon from Izbet Sartah. Israel Exploration Journal 28: 31-35.

BIBLICAL ARCHEOLOGIST/ WINTER 1980 25



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The Greek Alphabet: New Evidence