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14-08-2015, 17:01

Near Eastern borrowings: the alphabet

The identity of the dedicator is known from the inscription written on the thighs. The words are written boustro-phedon (lines of words written in alternating directions, an accepted choice in Greek writing from the eighth into the fifth centuries BC): “Mantiklos offers me as a tithe to Apollo of the silver bow; do you, Phoibos, give some pleasing favor in return” (Boardman 1978: fig. 10, p. 30). This is an early Greek inscription, indeed the earliest known dedicatory inscription. The Greeks adopted an alphabet from the Phoenicians in the mid-eighth century BC, thus ending some four centuries of illiteracy after Linear B fell out of use. This alphabet is still used by the Greeks today. Who thought to invent this alphabet and why and where are still unknown, but because contacts with Phoenicians were largely commercial, a commercial context seems most likely.

The Greeks added four new letters at the end and allotted vowels a particular prominence not seen in Phoenician. At first, as we see on Mantiklos’s statuette and elsewhere, the script was written in both directions, and upside down, and with letters sometimes on their sides. Only with time did the left-to-right direction become standard. Different cities and regions of Greece had variants in letter forms in the pre-Classical period. The Euboeans, early colonizers, carried their script to Italy, where it passed to the Etruscans and thence to the Romans and later Europeans.

Among the many beneficiaries of the resurgence of writing was literature. The Iliad and the Odyssey, epic poems about the Trojan War and Odysseus’s long journey home, were compiled and codified in the later Iron Age. For later Greeks, the author was Homer. Homer may have been simply the first to write down the poems, developed through centuries of telling and retelling. History, too, could emerge from the shadowy realm of legend. Indeed, the Greeks used as their benchmark of time the first Olympic Games, said to have been held in 776 BC (by our reckoning). These games were held every four years. Later events would be dated according to the closest Olympiad: such and such happened two years after the thirtieth Olympiad, for example.

Writing also nicely documents the contacts between Greeks and foreigners. In the mid-seventh century BC, Herodotus tells us, Ionian and Carian pirates were hired by the Egyptian king Psamtik I (Psammetichos, in Greek) to fight in his struggle to capture the throne of Egypt from the Assyrians. After he succeeded, he granted land in the Nile Delta to the soldiers, the first important Greek presence in Egypt. Perhaps their descendents formed part of a contingent of mercenaries who fought the Nubians with Psamtik II in the early sixth century BC. These soldiers travelled far up the Nile. At Abu Simbel, on the shin of one of the colossal seated statues of Ramses II, they carved their names and exploits, touristic graffiti one can still see today.



 

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