Homer and the Origin of the Greek Alphabet

By: Barry B. Powell

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Paperback | 10 February 1997

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308 Pages

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22.86 x 15.24 x 1.75

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What caused the invention of the Greek alphabet? Who did it, and why? The purpose of this challenging book is to inquire systematically into the historical causes that underlay the radical shift from earlier and less efficient writing systems to the use of alphabetic writing. The author declares his conclusion to be a possibly surprising one--that a single man, perhaps from the island of Euboea, invented the Greek alphabet specifically in order to record the Iliad and the Odyssey of Homer.

Industry Reviews

' ... this is a book which is as remarkable for the ingenuity of its answers to difficult questions as it is for its useful review and compelling display of so much of the relevant evidence.' Bryn Mawr Classical Review '[This] is an important book, and will be widely read by students of writing in other cultures as well as by Homerists, linguists, historians and archaeologists of early Greece.' Classical Philology

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List of figures	p. xiii
List of tables	p. xiv
Acknowledgements	p. xv
Abbreviations	p. xvi
A note on terms and phonetic transcriptions	p. xix
Chronological charts	p. xx
Maps	p. xxii
Foreword: Why was the Greek alphabet invented?	p. 1
Review of criticism: What we know about the origin of the Greek alphabet	p. 5
Phoenician origins	p. 5
Single introduction by a single man	p. 10
The place of adaptation	p. 12
The date of transmission	p. 18
The moment of transmission	p. 20
The names of the signs	p. 32
The sounds of the signs	p. 38
The vowels	p. 42
The problem of the sibilants	p. 46
The problem of the supplementals [phi] [chi] [Psi]	p. 48
The adapter's system	p. 63
Summary and conclusions	p. 66
Argument from the history of writing: How writing worked before the Greek alphabet	p. 68
Elements in the art of writing	p. 69
How logo-syllabic writing works: Egyptian hieroglyphic	p. 76
How syllabic writing works: the Cypriote syllabary	p. 89
How syllabic writing works: Phoenician	p. 101
Summary and conclusions	p. 105
Argument from the material remains: Greek inscriptions from the beginning to c. 650 B.C.	p. 119
The lack of semantic devices in early Greek writing	p. 119
"Short" Greek inscriptions from the beginning to c. 650 B.C.,	p. 123
"Long" Greek inscriptions from the beginning to c. 650 B.C.	p. 158
Conclusions	p. 181
Argument from coincidence: Dating Greece's earliest poet	p. 187
What dates does archaeology give for objects, practices, and social realities mentioned in Homer?	p. 190
Is there anything about the language of the Iliad and the Odyssey that can be dated?	p. 207
What are the earliest outside references to Homer?	p. 208
Homer's date in ancient tradition	p. 217
Conclusions: the date of Homer	p. 219
Conclusions from probability: how the Iliad and Odyssey were written down	p. 221
Writing and traditional song in Homer's day	p. 221
Conclusions	p. 231
Gelb's theory of the syllabic nature of West Semitic writing	p. 238
Homeric references in poets of the seventh century	p. 246
Definitions	p. 249
Bibliography	p. 254
Index	p. 277
Table of Contents provided by Syndetics. All Rights Reserved.

Homer and the Origin of the Greek Alphabet

At a Glance

Paperback

Industry Reviews

Shipping

How to return your order

Defective items

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