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Understanding Relations Between Scripts II: Early Alphabets Took Place in March 2017 at the Faculty of Classics, Cambridge Understanding Relations Between Scripts II Early Alphabets edited by Philip J. Boyes and Philippa M. Steele Oxford & Philadelphia Published in the United Kingdom in 2020 by OXBOW BOOKS The Old Music Hall, 106–108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JE and in the United States by OXBOW BOOKS 1950 Lawrence Road, Havertown, PA 19083 © Oxbow Books and the individual contributors 2020 Hardback Edition: ISBN 978-1-78925-092-3 Digital Edition: ISBN 978-1-78925-093-0 (ePub) A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Control Number: 2019948186 An open-access on-line version of this book is available at: http://books.casematepublishing.com/ Understanding_relations_between_Scripts_II_Early_alphabets. The online work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons. org/licenses/ by/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA. 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. Typeset in India for Casemate Publishing Services. www.casematepublishingservices.com For a complete list of Oxbow titles, please contact: UNITED KINGDOM UNITED STATES OF AMERICA Oxbow Books Oxbow Books Telephone (01865) 241249 Telephone (610) 853-9131, Fax (610) 853-9146 Email: [email protected] Email: [email protected] www.oxbowbooks.com www.casemateacademic.com/oxbow Oxbow Books is part of the Casemate Group Front cover: From the Cesnola Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public Domain image. Background image from Wikimedia Commons, by user Rama, CC BY-SA. Back cover: From the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public Domain image. This volume comprises the proceedings of a conference held at the Faculty of Classics in Cambridge on the 21 and 22 March 2017 as part of the Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing Systems (CREWS) project, which aims to explore new and revisit old ways of studying writing. This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 677758). Contents Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................v Abbreviations .........................................................................................................................vii 1. Introduction: Issues in studying early alphabets ......................................................1 Philip J. Boyes and Philippa M. Steele 2. A ʽtop-downʼ re-invention of an old form: Cuneiform alphabets in context ......15 Silvia Ferrara 3. Variation in alphabetic cuneiform: Rethinking the ‘Phoenician’ inscription from Sarepta ...................................................................................................................29 Philip J. Boyes 4. Ancient Egypt and the earliest known stages of alphabetic writing ...................53 Ben Haring 5. Much ado about an implement! – the Phoenicianising of Early Alphabetic ......69 Reinhard G. Lehmann 6. Vowel representation in the Archaic Greek and Old Aramaic scripts: A comparative orthographic and phonological examination ................................91 Roger D. Woodard 7. Mother or sister? Rethinking the origins of the Greek alphabet and its relation to the other ‘western’ alphabets ..........................................................109 Willemijn Waal 8. The development of Greek alphabets: Fluctuations and standardisations .......125 Philippa M. Steele 9. Between scripts and languages: Inscribed intricacies from geometric and archaic Greek contexts �����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������151 Giorgos Bourogiannis iv Contents 10. The matter of voice – the Umbrian perspective ....................................................181 Karin W. Tikkanen 11. Writings in network? The case of Palaeohispanic scripts ....................................197 Coline Ruiz Darasse Bibliography .........................................................................................................................207 Acknowledgements The conference Understanding Relations Between Scripts II: Early Alphabets took place in March 2017 at the Faculty of Classics, Cambridge. This was the first of a programme of collaborative events organised as part of the project Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing Systems (CREWS), which pursues interdisciplinary research into the devel- opment and context of writing around the Mediterranean and Levant in the second and first millennia BC. CREWS has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 677758). We would especially like to take this opportunity to thank the ERC for all the outstanding work it does to support new research, and in particular for the funding that has made not only this conference but the CREWS project itself possible. We are, as always, proud to fly the EU and ERC banners. Thanks are also owed to the Faculty of Classics for hosting and especially to our many colleagues behind the scenes who helped with the administrative side before, during and after the conference, in particular Tony Brinkman, Lina Undicino and Lucyna Prochnicka, as well as our CREWS project administrator Sarah Lewis. We would like to thank all the participants, attendants and volunteers who helped make the conference a success. In particular, Natalia Elvira Astoreca, Anna Judson, Ester Salgarella and James Bowe all offered their time and efforts to keep things run- ning smoothly. We are also very grateful to the reviewers who read and commented upon the written versions of the papers which appear in this volume. Everyone at Oxbow Books has been very helpful at every stage in the volume's preparation, in particular Julie Gardiner, Mette Bundgaard and Jessica Scott. Philip Boyes would like to thank Annie Burman, Anna Judson, Matthew Scar- borough, Daniel Unruh for their friendship, support and advice while editing this volume and researching and writing his contributions to it, and his wife Jennie for all that and love too. Pippa Steele would like to add further thanks to her partner James Bowe and her mother Anne for all their love, support and encouragement. Abbreviations BDHesp. Hesperia: Databank for Palaeohispanic languages and epigraphies, available online: www. http://hesperia.ucm.es/ CIS Corpus inscriptionum semiticarum (1881–) EG Guarducci, M. (1967–1978) Epigrafia greca. IC Guarducci, M. (1935–1950) Inscriptiones Creticae, vols. 1–4, Rome. ID Inscriptions de Délos (1926–1972) KAI Donner and Röllig (2002) Kanaanäische und aramäische Inschriften, 5th ed., Wiesbaden. KTU Dietrich, M., Loretz, O. and Sanmartín, J. (2013) The Cuneiform Alphabetic Texts from Ugarit, Ras Ibn Hani and Other Places. 3rd ed., Münster. MLH Untermann, J. (1990) Monumenta Linguarum Hispanicarum, Band III: Die Iberischen Inschriften aus Spanien, Wiesbaden. Untermann, J. (1997) Monumenta Linguarum Hispanicarum, Band IV: Die Tartessischen, Keltiberischen und Lusitanischen Inschriften, Wiesbaden. SEG Supplementum epigraphicum graecum (1923–) Chapter 1 Introduction: Issues in studying early alphabets Philip J. Boyes and Philippa M. Steele Within the Western world, the Alphabet (with a capital A) has become an icon of culture, knowledge and education.1 It is among the first things learned as part of a formal education and in the form of alphabet charts and abecedarian literature is visually and conceptually ubiquitous as young children are first forming an awareness of what education is. In a sense, the alphabet has come to be identified with that education. Knowing the alphabet, being literate in that specific writing system, is seen as a watershed in intellectual development; the achievement of a certain minimum standard for the participation in mainstream, civilised society. Of course, this is true to differing degrees with any modern writing system that is taught within a formal educational infrastructure and it is not unique to alphabets that writing can become closely bound up in ideas of identity and educational status. However, the West’s historically-rooted cultural and political hegemony has allowed those socialised within it to normalise, privilege and arguably fetishise ‘the Alphabet’ in ways that are less open to users of writing systems without such a cross-cultural global reach and centuries of political and ideological dominance to back it up. For many, both in academia and the wider culture, the temptation has been to see alphabetic writing as the pinnacle of the development of human writing, with other writing systems either implicitly or explicitly relegated to primitive stages on the way, with corresponding implications for the societies that used and continue to use them. For those of us who study alphabetic writing, we must walk the line between illuminating the history and importance of such scripts and fetishising them as
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