Philippa M. Steele
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This licence allows for copying any part of the online work for personal and commercial use, providing author attribution is clearly stated. Some rights reserved. No part of the print edition of the book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the publisher in writing. Materials provided by third parties remain the copyright of their owners. AN OFFPRINT FROM Understanding Relations Between Scripts II Early Alphabets Hardback Edition: ISBN 978-1-78925-092-3 Digital Edition: ISBN 978-1-78925-093-0 (ePub) edited by Philip J. Boyes and Philippa M. Steele Oxbow & Philadelphia Chapter 8 The development of Greek alphabets: Fluctuations and standardisations1 Philippa M. Steele However alphabetic writing arrived in Greece – a question that continues to be debated – we know that a number of different regional variations of the Greek alphabet (local scripts with some significant differences in sign repertoire and sign shapes) arose at an early stage, making it appropriate to speak of alphabets in the plural. There are various models for thinking about how such a situation might have arisen, as represented for instance by the opposing camps advocating monogenesis (a single initial adaptation followed by local differentiation involving additions/reductions to the repertoire and other changes) or polygenesis (multiple initial adaptations following separate local trajectories); the former remains the more popular (see e.g. the lengthy exposition in Wachter 1989). Further problems often discussed are the date and place(s) of adaptation, the source script(s) from which the adaptation was made (usually assumed to be Phoenician but Aramaic has been suggested as a possibility) and the relationship between the Greek alphabet and other early ones, particularly in Phrygia and Italy. This last aspect is especially important because it is by no means certain that Greek speakers alone (or at all?) first borrowed and adapted a Semitic consonantal alphabet and added dedicated vowel signs to it, and it would perhaps be better to think of this alphabet-with-vowels as a Mediterranean rather than Greek phenomenon. The framing of all these issues as ‘problems’ and ‘questions’ may alert the reader to the fact that, despite some at times quite intense debate, little ground has been gained other than some prevailing opinions. An attempt to move the debate 1 The work underpinning this paper, like the conference from which it stems, is part of the research output of the project Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing Systems, funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (CREWS, grant no. 677758). I would like to thank Philip Boyes, Rupert Thompson and James Whitley for their very helpful comments and feedback on earlier drafts of this chapter. 126 Philippa M. Steele 8. The development of Greek alphabets 127 forward, particularly in regard to the date and earliest stage of development, is indeed letter forms that will not figure in the local alphabet once the evidence becomes more at the heart of Willemijn Waal’s chapter in this volume (see also Waal 2018). abundant and consistent forms of local alphabets start becoming visible’ (2010, 73). The present chapter does not aim to deal with the problems outlined very briefly The most economical explanation for this state of affairs could be that the regional above,2 but they must nevertheless be flagged up at the outset because the way we alphabets simply had not yet acquired their fixed forms at this stage – with the caveat think about the genesis of alphabetic writing in the Mediterranean affects the way we that local processes of standardisation may indeed have taken place at different rates, think about the starting position for the Greek alphabet(s). Indeed, the above questions in different contexts. may be considered unanswerable, at least with any degree of certainty or specificity. Even the motivations behind the original adaptation of the Greek (/Mediterranean) alphabet and its usage in its earliest years remain a matter of some contention in A useful parallel in Cyprus scholarship: the idea that recording hexametric poetry was the sole motivation Before turning to the Greek alphabetic material, culminating in a case study focused on (Powell 1991) has given way to a range of more nuanced views emphasising the roles the Cretan alphabet, a brief excursus on Cypriot writing can provide a useful parallel. of trading networks, religious practice at international sanctuaries and international During the Iron Age, Cyprus was divided into a number of independent city kingdoms, elite symposiastic behaviour in the spread of writing (see for instance the papers in with their own kings, political structures, coinage and territory. Some of the earliest Strauss-Clay, Malkin and Tzifopoulos 2017). Nevertheless, the possibility of recovering evidence for this political division of the island comes from external sources during or reconstructing something of the circumstances in which the alphabet first appeared the period of the island’s inclusion in the Assyrian empire: official inscriptions of and subsequently developed remains high on the agenda of current scholarship. the Assyrian kings Sargon II (late eighth century BC) and Esarhaddon (early seventh My aim is rather to explore and to some extent rethink the nature of the evidence century BC) list seven and ten Cypriot kingdoms respectively, and these kingdoms for the regional variation in Greek alphabetic writing during the first centuries of its can for the most part comfortably be identified with ones that are well attested from existence. It has been eloquently illustrated by Nino Luraghi (2010) that the existence later historical sources (see Yon 1987b, 365–367, with particular attention to the of the regional variants of the Greek alphabet has everything to do with conscious Qartihadasht problem, and O. Masson 1992a). There also exist two seventh-century choices on the part of Greek speakers in connection with perceived political, linguistic BC Cypriot inscriptions, commissioned by kings of independent Paphos (a kingdom and ethnic boundaries. Alan Johnston has also questioned (1998) and emphasised in western Cyprus) who refer to themselves by the Greek term basileus.3 Over time, it (2012) links between local alphabets and the poleis. There can be no doubt that the can be demonstrated that writing – in its peculiar syllabic form in the case of Cypriot geopolitical landscape of the Greek-speaking world in the Archaic period bore a close Greek and Eteocypriot4 – was appropriated by the city kingdoms as a significant tool relationship with, and was to some extent enshrined in, the use and maintenance of of administration and local power (Iacovou 2013). writing systems that were visibly distinct from each other despite obviously being There is an obvious and important difference between Cyprus and the Aegean closely related. However, an important caveat is that this state of affairs is only clearly concerning developments in literacy. In Cyprus, the skill of writing in a syllabic script demonstrable for the later part of the Archaic period, let’s say at least partially by remained in use without interruption (albeit with some changes) from the Late Bronze the second half of the seventh but more fully when we get to the sixth century BC. Age through to the age of the city kingdoms, which themselves had their roots in It is precisely because the distinct local alphabets are so well established by this an earlier situation of political diversity on the island (on the longevity of regional period that it is possible to provenance many inscriptions on the basis of letter forms. political centres on Cyprus, see Snodgrass 1994 and Iacovou 2002, 2007). In Greece, By contrast, the earliest Greek alphabetic inscriptions, from the mid-eighth to on the other hand, the sudden demise of Mycenaean civilisation around the end of the mid-seventh century, often cannot be as easily pigeonholed – not only because of the thirteenth century BC coincided with the complete loss of literacy in most or the admitted scarcity of the evidence, but also because the distribution of evidence all areas, and the resurgence of writing attested from the eighth century onwards does not quite fit what we might expect based on the later distribution. In Luraghi’s (now alphabetic, not syllabic like the Mycenaean Linear B script) followed a period words, this earlier period features ‘a surprisingly high number of cases of local use of of illiteracy. Nevertheless, Cyprus exhibits a trend in writing that is both comparable and more-or-less synchronic with the appearance of regional alphabets in Greece. 2 I will instead point the reader in the direction of some of the most recent pieces on the early years of the Greek alphabet, which, taken together, will give some impression of the current state of debate: Papadopoulos 2016; the papers in Strauss-Clay, Malkin and Tzifopoulos 2017; Bourogiannis 3 Gold bracelets of king Etewandros (ICS 176), silver gilt bowl of king Akestor (ICS 180a), both 2018; Waal 2018.