At some point during the Dark Age, as has slowly become clear, literacy arose anew in Greece. This time, however, it was not a syllabary, but rather an alphabet. The Greek alphabet, as scholars have long realized, is modeled on an alphabet used by the Phoenicians, a Semitic people. The names of some Greek letters reveal this Semitic origin clearly: the names “alpha,” “beta,” and “delta” are still easily recognizable as the Semitic words for “ox,” “house,” and “door.” The particular alphabet which the Greeks used as a model for their own could originally indicate consonants only (and vowels either not at all or in no unambiguous way). The peculiar Greek innovation was to use certain signs in this Phoenician alphabet to write vowels only. Thus, the signs He and Yodh, used in Phoenician for the consonant sounds /h/ and /y/, in the Greeks’ hands became the letters e(psilon) and iota - and were used for the vowel sounds /e/ and /i/. This idea of using specific signs both for vowels and for consonants was unique in the ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern world.
Earlier scholarship commonly assumed that the Greeks adopted (and adapted) the Phoenician alphabet in the course of the eighth century. This was in line with the then prevailing view that there had been no contact between Greece and the Near East during the Dark Age. Recently, however, students of Phoenician epigraphy have been pointing out that the actual forms of the various letters in the Greek alphabet bear a far greater resemblance to the letter forms in currency among the Phoenicians during the ninth and tenth centuries. If one were to assume that no contact between Greece and Phoenicia existed during the Dark Age, then that would be an inexplicable situation indeed. If, however, contact did exist, then an explanation for this circumstance lies ready to hand; but the views of the Phoenician epigraphers have yet to win full acceptance among classicists.
World History
