The history of the Greek alphabet began with the adoption of Phoenician letter forms in the 9th–8th centuries BC during early Archaic Greece and continues to the present day. The Greek alphabet was developed during the Iron Age, centuries after the loss of Linear B, the syllabic script that was used for writing Mycenaean Greek until the Late Bronze Age collapse and Greek Dark Age.
The Phoenician alphabet was consistently explicit about consonants. By the 9th century BC it had developed to indicate some, mostly final, vowels.M. O'Connor, Epigraphic Semitic Scripts, in Daniels and Bright, The World's Writing Systems, 1996 This arrangement is much less suitable for Greek than for Semitic languages, and these , 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. After it was established in the Greek mainland, it was exported eastwards to Phrygia, where a similar script was devised. It was also exported westward with Euboean or West Greek traders, where the Etruscans adapted the Greek alphabet to their own language, which eventually led to the Latin alphabet.
Chronology of adoption
Most specialists believe that the Phoenician alphabet was adopted for Greek during the early 8th century BC, perhaps in Euboea.The date of the earliest inscribed objects; A.W. Johnston, "The alphabet", in N. Stampolidis and V. Karageorghis, eds, Sea Routes from Sidon to Huelva: Interconnections in the Mediterranean 2003:263-76, summarizes the present scholarship on the dating. The earliest known fragmentary Greek inscriptions date from this time, 770–750 BC, and they match Phoenician letter forms of c. 800–750 BC.Pierre Swiggers, Transmission of the Phoenician Script to the West, in Daniels and Bright, The World's Writing Systems, 1996 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.Panhellenes at Methone: Graphê in Late Geometric and Protoarchaic Methone, edited by Jenny Strauss Clay, Irad Malkin, Yannis Z. Tzifopoulos, Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG, 2017, pg154 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.On the "Phoenician Letters": The case for an early transmission of the Greek alphabet from an archaeological, epigraphic and linguistic perspective; W. Waal in Aegean Studies No. 1 2018, p. 83-125
The Fayum alphabet, originating on Cyprus, seems to be older than the fragmentary Greek inscriptions: it is dated to c. 800 BC and appears to preserve the earliest known form of the Greek alphabet. This could indicate that the Phoenician alphabet was adapted to Greek on Cyprus, where an important Phoenician colony existed at the time in the city-kingdom of Kition; however, the Cypriot syllabary, which was already employed at the time to write the local dialect, having been in use since the 11th century, remained in use in Cyprus until the 4th century BC and was not replaced by the adapted Phoenician alphabet this early.
Another possibility is that the adaptation happened on Thera, which Herodotus and Pausanias claim to have been settled early by Phoenicians descending from Cadmus; however, a Phoenician presence on the island has not been proven archaeologically.
Herodotus' account According to legends recounted by Herodotus, the alphabet was first introduced to Greece by a Phoenician named Cadmus:
Herodotus estimates that Cadmus lived sixteen hundred years earlier, or around 2000 BC.Herodotus. Histories, Book II, 2.145.4. He had seen and described the Cadmean writing engraved on certain tripods in the temple of Apollo at Thebes. He estimated that those tripods dated back to the time of Laius, the great-grandson of Cadmus.Herodotus. Histories, Book V.59.1 On one of the tripods there was this inscription in Cadmean writing, which as he attested, resembled Ionian letters: ("Amphitryon dedicated me from the spoils of [the battle of] Teleboae."). A second tripod bears the inscription in hexameter verse: . ("Scaeus the boxer, victorious in the contest, dedicated me to Apollo, the archer god, a lovely offering"). Herodotus estimated that if Scaeus, the son of Hippocoon was the dedicator and not another of the same name, he would have lived at the time of Oedipus. The third tripod bears the inscription again in hexameter verse: . ("Laodamas, while he reigned, dedicated this cauldron to Apollo, the sure of aim, as a lovely offering").
Hyginus' account Hyginus recounts the following legends about the development of the alphabet:
Diodorus' account Some ancient Greek scholars argued that the Greek alphabet should not be attributed to the Phoenician alphabet. Diodorus Siculus in his Historical Library, Book 5, suggests that the Phoenicians merely "changed the form and shape" of earlier letters:
Plutarch's account In his essay "On the Malice of Herodotus", Plutarch criticizes Herodotus for prejudice and misrepresentation. Furthermore, he argues that Gephyraei were Euboeans or Eretrians and he doubts the reliability of Herodotus' sources.
Plutarch and other ancient Greek writers credited the legendary Palamedes of Nauplion on Euboea with the invention of the supplementary letters not found in the original Phoenician alphabet. The distinction between Eta and Epsilon and between Omega and Omicron, adopted in the Ionian standard, was traditionally attributed to Simonides of Ceos (556–469).
Plutarch goes further back to describe an older Greek writing system, similar as he attested to the Egyptian writing. In his "Discourse Concerning Socrates's Daemon",Plutarch, The Morals, vol. 2, A Discourse Concerning Socrates's Daemon – online text he describes how Agesilaus king of Sparta, uncovers Alcmene's tomb at Haliartus and discovers a brazen plate on which a very ancient script was written, much older than the Ancient Greek alphabet. Agesilaus sent a transcript to Egypt in order to be translated back into Ancient Greek. Agetoridas the Spartan travelled to Memphis of Egypt and gave the transcript to Chonouphis the Egyptian priest. Some scholars speculate that this plate was written in Linear B.Crossing boundaries and linking horizons: studies in honor of Michael C. Astour: "The alleged tomb of Alcmene was opened, and a bronze tablet was found there with a long inscription in an unknown script, which they thought resembled Egyptian signs. It was probably written in Linear B." Agesilaus' decision to have text sent to Egypt is not unreasonable; it is widely accepted that Ancient Egyptians during the 4th century BC were able to translate to and from various other languages; they used three different writing systems within Egypt: hieroglyphic script, hieratic and demotic; this tradition continued during the Hellenistic period when all kinds of scripts were translated and copies were added to the library of Alexandria; one example today of a script written in three forms is the Rosetta Stone that appears in three texts: in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, in Egyptian demotic, and in ancient Greek. And therefore, as the story goes, the Egyptian priest, having studied the script and translated it, concluded that the writing enjoined the Greeks to institute games in honor of the Muses.
Restructuring of the Phoenician abjad + Phoenician and Greek alphabets Phoenician Greek alp alpha bet beta gaml gamma dalt delta he epsilon waw digamma upsilon zen zeta ḥet heta ṭet theta yod iota kap kappa lamd lambda mem mu nun nu samk xi en omicron omega pe pi tsade san qop koppa rosh rho shin sigma taw tau phi chi psi
The majority of the letters of the Phoenician alphabet were adopted into Greek with much the same sounds as they had had in Phoenician. However, Phoenician, like other Semitic scripts, has a range of consonants, commonly called gutturals, that did not exist in Greek: alp , he , het , and en . Of these, only ḥet was retained in Greek as a consonant, heta, representing the sound in those dialects that had an , while the consonants alp, he and en became the vowels alpha , e and o , respectively.
Phoenician had foreshadowed the development of vowel letters with a limited use of matres lectionis, that is, consonants that pulled double duty as vowels, which for historical reasons occurred mostly at the ends of words. For example, the two letters waw and yod stood for both the approximant consonants and , and the long vowels and in Phoenician. By this point in time, Greek had lost its sound, so Phoenician yod was used for its vocalic value, becoming the Greek vowel letter iota . Several Greek dialects preserved a sound, and here waw was used for both of its Phoenician values, but with different forms: as the Greek letter digamma for the consonant , and as the letter upsilon for the vowel . Upsilon was added at the end of the alphabet, perhaps to avoid upsetting the alphabetic order that was used in Greek numerals. Phoenician he had been used as a mater lectionis for both and in addition to , but in Greek it was restricted to , following the acrophonic principle; its value was instead written with the letter alp, while Greek was written with ḥet.
All Phoenician letters had been acrophonic, and they remained so in Greek. Since the names of the letters alp and he were pronounced and by the Greeks, with initial vowels due to the silent gutturals (the disambiguation e psilon "narrow e" came later), the acrophonic principle was retained for vowels as well as consonants by using them for the Greek vowel sounds and . Only the letter en for necessitated a change of name (o, later omicron).C. Brixhe, "History of the Alphabet", in Christidēs, Arapopoulou, & Chritē, eds., 2007, A History of Ancient Greek
The Phoenician consonants kap and qop represented sounds that were not distinctive in Greek—at most, they may have been identified with allophones determined by the following vowel. The letter koppa was used in certain Greek dialects (notably the western dialects, which ultimately gave rise to Etruscan and eventually the Latin alphabet), but elsewhere dropped out of general use. It is possible that koppa had been assigned to the Ancient Greek , and when that sound shifted to , the letter koppa continued as the letter phi.
Phoenician had three letters, samk, tsade, and shin, representing three or probably four voiceless sibilant sounds, whereas Greek only required one. The notation of the sound varied between tsade and shin. The letter now known as sigma took its name from samk but its form from shin, while the letter San, which occurred in a few dialects only, took its name from shin but its place in the alphabet from tsade. A further Greek letter of uncertain origin, sampi, is found occasionally, and may represent an affricate, such as .
Epichoric alphabets
In the 8th to 6th centuries, local or epichoric variants of the alphabet developed. They are classified into three main groups, following Adolf Kirchhoff (1887): green (Cretan), red (Euboean or Western) and blue (Ionic, Attic and Corinthian). The main distinction is in the supplemental signs added to the Phoenician core inventory.