The Genesis of the Local Alphabets of Archaic Greece

Abstract

This chapter stresses the importance of the series of letters people actually learnt and taught in the different 'local scripts', together with the series of letter names they learnt by heart. The physical manifestation of this tradition is in abecedaria. The differences between these local alphabets can be explained by three types of reform that took place while the alphabet spread, viz. the adding, reinterpreting, or abolishing of letters. Attention to chronology allows quite precise 'predictions' about the otherwise hidden first years of the alphabet in Greece. Some common views will therefore have to be given up, for instance that the three islands, Thera, Melos, and Crete, which use a particularly archaic type of alphabet, are therefore plausible candidates for particularly early writing. The takeover of the alphabet was a single event, but we will very likely never be able to specify either where or when precisely it took place.