The skilled laborers who built the fortified palaces and the craft specialists who produced the luxury goods through which the elite both affirmed its status and boosted its wealth were supported by the agricultural surpluses that the palatial centers exacted from the countryside. With the collapse of the palaces as effective political, administrative, and economic centers, those skills were no longer required. Monumental architecture, figured representations on pottery, engraving of precious metals, and ivoryworking all disappear from the material record, not to resurface for at least another three centuries. From the point of view of the historian, one of the most significant skills to fall into abeyance is that of writing.
Linear B was a cumbersome script with some sixty ideograms and at least a further eighty-nine signs, most of which stand for syllables rather than individual phonemes. It must have been a comparatively difficult system to learn and, given that it seems to have been employed solely for commercial and accounting purposes, demand for people literate in it can never have been high. These considerations, together with the fact that only a limited number of different handwritings can be identified in the tablets, make it virtually certain that literate competence was restricted to a small number of scribes, probably no more than a handful at any one time in each palatial center. There is no reason to suppose that future excavations will reveal the persistence of literacy into Early Iron Age Greece - unlike on Cyprus, where an inscribed bronze spit, found in tomb 49 at Palaipaphos-Skales and dated to the late eleventh or early tenth century, may indicate some continuity between the Late Bronze Age Cypro-Minoan script and the syllabic Cypriot script attested in the Archaic period. Faced with the realization that their skills were redundant after the disappearance of the palaces, the scribes would have needed to make provisions for their own livelihood. Some may well have passed their expertise onto their children but, in the absence of any functional application, it is unlikely that competence in Linear B would have survived more than a generation or so.
Quite when, how, and where writing returned to Greece is a matter of some dispute. Let us start with what we know. The earliest known graffiti are written on pottery that generally appears to belong to around the middle of the eighth century, though slightly earlier dates have been claimed for graffiti from Eretria, Naxos, and Lefkandi, while a small, globular flask, incised with what seem to be four or five Greek letters and found in a grave at Osteria dell’Osa, east of Rome, is unlikely to be later than ca. 800-775 BCE. Technically, a graffito could be scratched on a pot some time after its manufacture, meaning that the decorative style of the pot would offer little assistance in dating the inscription. In practice, however, many of the earliest graffiti appear on vessels that served as grave offerings and the latest vases in the assemblage will normally date the closure of the tomb and thus serve as a terminus ante quem for the inscription. Furthermore, the fact that dipinti - inscriptions painted on pots prior to firing - appear on ceramics dating to the third quarter of the eighth century at Pithec-usae provides some reassurance that most graffiti were probably roughly contemporary with the pots on which they were scratched.
Nor is there much dispute concerning the origin of the Greek alphabet. Despite a claim that it was borrowed from a Canaanite alphabet ca. 1150, most scholars are agreed that it is an adaptation of the later Phoenician, or Northwest Semitic, script. Greek scripts display notable local characteristics - principally with regard to the shape of letters but also in the matter of the phonetic values attributed to signs such as san, sigma, khi, and psi. All local Greek scripts, however, share important divergences from the Phoenician prototype, notably in the reutilization of certain Semitic consonantal symbols to represent vowels and perhaps in the creation of three new symbols to represent aspirated plosives (phi, khi, and psi). These shared divergences would suggest that the Greek alphabet was born in one place only, in a single moment and perhaps as a result of the initiative of a single creator. Local differences would have arisen only subsequently. What is less clear is where such a transmission took place and whether our earliest extant graffiti are really the first examples of writing or whether writing was actually practiced earlier but on more perishable items such as skins or wood that have not survived in the archaeological record.
In terms of the place of transmission, the Eastern Mediterranean has generally been favored as a place where Greeks and Phoenicians came into regular contact with one another. Crete is situated in an advantageous position to disseminate the alphabet to other Greek regions, and at Kommos, on the southern coast, there is evidence for the construction of a Phoenician tripillar shrine, dated to ca. 800. Cyprus, where permanent Phoenician settlements appear from the ninth century, is another candidate, but the early attestation of graffiti at Eretria, Lefkandi, and Pithecusae gives some reason to suppose that it was a Euboean who was responsible for adapting the Phoenician alphabet to fit the Greek language. That might have happened at Al Mina, a trading-post on the mouth of the River Orontes in modern Turkey, where large quantities of imported Euboean pottery have been excavated (see pp. 100-102). Alternatively, the Osteria dell’Osa inscription must at least raise the possibility of a transmission in Italy, where Euboeans undoubtedly lived alongside Phoenicians and others in the trading-post of Pithecusae. Some have objected that the letters on the Osteria dell’Osa flask make no sense and may not, therefore, represent the Greek language. On the other hand, one could argue that this sort of unintelligibility is exactly what one ought to expect to find when a population attempts to come to grips with an entirely new skill. A third possibility is in Euboea itself, where a late ninth - or early eighth-century Semitic graffito has been found scratched onto an early Middle Geometric cup from the sanctuary of Apollo Daphnepho-ros at Eretria. For all that, it is worth pointing out that the theory of an individual adapter does not require the documented existence of intense interaction between Greeks and Phoenicians. Unfortunately, the archaeological record is not always capable of identifying the activity of single individuals, as opposed to groups, meaning that the transmission of the alphabet could theoretically have occurred anywhere.
The issue of an earlier, epigraphically invisible transmission is more difficult. It has been suggested that the shapes of the letters on the earliest Greek graffiti resemble most closely the shapes that Phoenician letters assumed ca. 800, implying that the alphabet was transmitted only very shortly before its earliest attestations on painted pottery. Since, however, there exists only a handful of extant Phoenician inscriptions that predate 500, it is difficult to establish a reliable stylistic sequence of letter forms. Furthermore, the stylistic comparison would only be valid if we could be absolutely certain that our earliest surviving Greek inscriptions truly belong to the first generation of Greek scripts. Ultimately, it is a matter of plausibility. While it is entirely possible that the Greeks wrote on perishable materials, it is perhaps less likely that they studiously avoided scratching graffiti on ceramic vessels until the eighth century.
Quite why the Phoenician script was borrowed and adapted is hard to tell. One theory suggests that it was invented to record, in more permanent form, oral epic poetry, though the failure of the earliest scripts to distinguish between the long and short - e - and - o - grades, whose differential value is critical to hexameter verse, makes that an unlikely proposition. Another regards the forging of a Greek script as a highly visible corollary to the emergence of a “Panhellenic” or Greek ethnic consciousness, constructed - ironically enough - in opposition to the Phoenicians from whom the alphabet was borrowed, but there must be serious doubts that Panhellenic sentiments date back this early (see chapter 11). The appearance of single letters and symbolic marks on eighth-century pottery from Methone (p. 116) might lend some weight to the idea that the alphabet was intended to facilitate commercial transactions, although economic considerations do not seem to be at play in other early inscriptions. Aside from “Nestor’s Cup” (see p. 24) and an Attic Late Geometric oinokhoe (wine-jug), found in the Kerameikos district of Athens (Figure 3.3), which carries the metrical graffito “Whoever of all the dancers now dances most daintily, of him this. . . ,” the vast majority of eighth-century inscriptions simply involve names, indicating either ownership or the recipient of dedications. There is nothing to match the detailed record-keeping of the Linear B tablets.
The effect that the advent of literacy had on Greek society now appears less revolutionary than was once thought. Traditionally, anthropologists used to draw a sharp distinction between the cognitive faculties employed by oral and literate societies respectively, but this dichotomy appears to have been rather overstated in general and is certainly unsatisfactory for the Greek world. The existence of literacy may have created favorable preconditions for the development of rational thought, detailed administrative and financial accounting, and
Figure 3.3 Attic Late Geometric oinokhoe. Source: National Archaeological Museum, Athens. Durutomo / Wikimedia Commons
A more historical consciousness but none of these applications was truly realized until several centuries later. Notwithstanding what appears to be a fairly early and relatively pervasive literate competence in regions such as Attica, Greece remained an essentially oral society until well into the Classical period.
World History
