page_title: History of the Greek alphabet
section_title: Chronology of adoption
hierarchical_section_title: History of the Greek alphabet / Chronology of adoption
caption_attribution_description: English: One of the four oldest known samples of the use of the Greek alphabet. It has been dated to ca. 740 BCE. ...(h)ος νῦν ὀρχεστôν πάντον ἀταλό(τατα)...
context_page_description: The history of the Greek alphabet starts with the adoption of Phoenician letter forms and continues to the present day. The Greek alphabet postdates Linear B, the syllabic script that was used for writing Mycenaean Greek, by several centuries.
  The Phoenician alphabet was strictly speaking one that was consistently explicit only about consonants, though even by the 9th century BC it had developed matres lectionis to indicate some, mostly final, vowels. This arrangement is much less suitable for Greek than for Semitic languages, and these matres lectionis, as well as several Phoenician letters which represented consonants not present in Greek, were adapted according to the acrophonic principle to represent Greek vowels consistently, if not unambiguously.
  The Greek alphabet was developed by a Greek with first-hand experience of contemporary Phoenician script. Almost as quickly as it was established in the Greek mainland, it was rapidly re-exported, eastwards to Phrygia, where a similar script was devised. It was also exported westwards with Euboean or West Greek traders, where the Etruscans adapted the Greek alphabet to their own language, which eventually led to the Latin alphabet.
context_section_description: Most specialists believe that the Phoenician alphabet was adopted for Greek during the early 8th century BC, perhaps in Euboea. The earliest known fragmentary Greek inscriptions date from this time, 770–750 BC, and they match Phoenician letter forms of c. 800–750 BC. The oldest substantial texts known to date are the Dipylon inscription and the text on the so-called Cup of Nestor, both dated to the late 8th century BC, inscriptions of personal ownership and dedications to a god.
  Tradition recounts that a daughter of a certain Agamemnon, king of Aeolian Cyme, married a Phrygian king called Midas. This link may have facilitated the Greeks "borrowing" their alphabet from the Phrygians because the Phrygian letter shapes are closest to the inscriptions from Aeolis.
  Some scholars argue for earlier dates: Naveh (1973) for the 11th century BC, Stieglitz (1981) for the 14th century, Bernal (1990) for the 18th–13th century, some for the 9th, but none of these are widely accepted.
caption: Dipylon inscription
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