Greek writing from Knossos to Homer
Subtitle: a linguistic interpretation of the origin of the Greek alphabet and the continuity of ancient Greek literacy
By: Roger D. Woodard.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 1997
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 287
Subjects: Greek language -- Alphabet; Written communication -- Greece -- History.; Language and culture -- Greece -- History.; Greek language -- Written Greek.; Literacy -- Greece -- History.; Greek language -- Writing.
Description: Greek Writing from Knossos to Homer examines the origin of the Greek alphabet. Departing from previous accounts, Roger Woodard places the advent of the alphabet within an unbroken continuum of Greek literacy beginning in the Mycenaean era. He argues that the creators of the Greek alphabet, who adapted the Phoenician consonantal script, were scribes accustomed to writing Greek with the syllabic script of Cyprus.

Certain characteristic features of the Cypriot script - for example, its strategy for representing consonant sequences and elements of Cypriot Greek phonology - were transferred to the new alphabetic script. Proposing a Cypriot origin of the alphabet at the hands of previously literate adapters brings clarity to various problems of the alphabet, such as the Greek use of the Phoenician sibilant letters.

The alphabet, rejected by the post-Bronze Age "Mycenaean" culture of Cyprus, was exported west to the Aegean, where it gained a foothold among a then illiterate Greek people emerging from the Dark Age. Woodard's study, a combination of philological and epigraphical investigation with linguistic theory, should be of interest to both scholars and students of classics, linguistics, and Near Eastern studies.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 268-278) and index.