Who Invented the Alphabet: The Semites or the Greeks?

Archaeolgy Odyssey ^ | Winter 1998 | Barry B. Powell

[SunkenCiv]

I would make the startling suggestion that the alphabet was invented by a single human being, who created this remarkable technology to record the Greek hexameters of the poet we call Homer.

Certainly everyone agrees that the invention of the alphabet made possible the development of philosophy, science and democracy, some of the finest achievements in the history of human culture. But who invented the alphabet? Was it really the Semitic-speaking Phoenicians, as many of us learned in grammar school? Or was it actually the Greeks, to whom the Phoenicians supposedly passed it?

I don't believe the Phoenicians actually had an alphabet. The alphabet was a Greek invention. I would even make the startling suggestion that the alphabet was invented by a single human being, who created this remarkable technology to record the Greek hexameters of the poet we call Homer...

For convenience, I call this supreme inventor of the Greek alphabet the Adapter. The Adapter chose five signs from the West Semitic syllabary to use as vowel sounds, as reflected in every early Greek alphabetic inscription. Both the number of signs (five) and the particular signs chosen are arbitrary. Ancient Greek has many more than five vowel sounds; indeed, in later Greek inscriptions, seven vowel signs are employed, and there could have been more.

[SunkenCiv]

:’D

[SunkenCiv]

In her Plato Prehistorian: 10,000 to 5000 B.C. Myth, Religion, Archaeology, Mary Settegast reproduces a table which shows four runic character sets; a is Upper Paleolithic (found among the cave paintings), b is Indus Valley script, c is Greek (western branch), and d is the Scandinavian runic alphabet.

[SunkenCiv]

Ironically, I misspelled the source as “Archaeolgy Odyssey” instead of the correct “Archaeology Odyssey”. That said, I’d love it if everyone would read the original article. Thanks.

[Yardstick]

The Semites or the Greeks?

How 'bout the Semiotics?

[dr_lew]

Yeah, the Greeks were amazing enough without piling on extras. It's not that they were necessarily first at anything in particular, but that their thoughts as expressed in their classical literature seem so sophisticated and modern to us. The word "automaton" occurs in Homer with essentially its modern meaning. This alone has fascinated scholars for centuries. Here's a partial list of ancient Greek words adopted unchanged into English, from Teach Yourself Ancient Greek:

acme, anathema, analysis, antithesis, asbestos, automaton, aphasia, genesis, diagnosis, dogma, drama, zone, echo, idea, ( k -> c )cinema, climax, cosmos, crisis, miasma, orchestra, scene ( skene, ) stigma, hypothesis, chaos, character

We have inherited not just these words, but many of these concepts from the ancient Greeks.

[ModelBreaker]

Wow. It’s Robert Graves night on FR. This is the second mention I have read of his name tonite.

[muawiyah]

Thankyou.

[ApplegateRanch]

I just looked at your Photobucket gallery. What are you, some kind of Right Winger?

[null and void]

Of some kind...

[null and void]

Are you anti-semantic?

[Verginius Rufus]

There are also many Greek words in English which have been modified in transition so the spelling isn't exactly what it was originally, like "crocodile" (krokodeilos). Other words were mangled further, like "surgeon" from cheirourgos ("hand" + "worker"), or "church" from kyriake (from kyrios, "lord").

Curiously enough, many words in ancient Greek were borrowed from another language including some basic words like those for "sea" and "tongue." Many of the words seem to be from the previous inhabitants of Greece but there are also Semitic loan-words in Greek.

[BenKenobi]

I teach history.

I started my class off with a discussion. Take every idea you can thing of in philosophy. The Greeks built the ‘idea shelf’ as I like to call it.

All we do now is shuffle their ideas around. But it’s still the same shelf.

[kabumpo]

Thanks for letting me know. He was a brilliant mind, great writer.

[dr_lew]

All we do now is shuffle their ideas around.

Let's not sell ourselves short. A popular idea in Newton's time, which Newton himself subscribed to, was the "wise age", ( the "siecle sage" of Simon Stevin, ) an imagined prehistoric or hidden time when all knowledge had been obtained. It was thought that the Greeks and others were imperfectly transmitting this knowledge to us. Newton's interest in Alchemy was based on his conviction that it transmitted encoded knowledge from this time. Ironic in view of the fact that Newton himself transcended anything that came before him by several degrees.

[BenKenobi]

Which is why I referred to philosophy instead of natural philosophy. ;)

Even so, many advanced concepts were present in Greek times. Heliocentrism, elements, atomic theory, etc. They even had napalm.

[dr_lew]

Which is why I referred to philosophy instead of natural philosophy. ;)

Of course, natural philosophy was to the ancients a particular focus of philosophy, and not a separate area of thinking.

Something that has fascinated me is the section of the Phaedo, recounting the death of Socrates, where he allows himself to digress in his very last moments into speculation concerning the nature of the globe of the earth. I's always been puzzling to me that these passages have been so little remarked upon, as they are fairly extensive.

He likens it to "one of those balls made of twelve pieces of skin", i.e. a dodecahedron, and each face is evidently its own "flat earth" isolated from the others. He speaks of each of these regions as having separate characters, and one is put in mind of Riverworld, or perhaps Flash Gordon, with its separate planetary realms.

I see it as an attempt, most probably by Plato as author, but maybe by Socrates himself, to reconcile the spherical earth taught by astronomy ( A Greek word! ) with the flat earth evident to our senses.

[gleeaikin]

Regarding Abram (Abraham), he apparently traveled from the middle east all the way to Egypt around 1900 BC. I am wondering if the 4,000 year old 2 mile wide crater that was found in the Iraq marshes could have disrupted living conditions enough to encourage such a migration. Of course, the Egyptians also record their disasterous First Intermediate Period around that time (Google: Ipuwer papyrus). In addition around 1900 BC Egyptians from the reign of Sesostris(sp?) were also settled at the east end of the Black Sea. Thus Abram could have encountered several possible sources of writing.

SC: Is there any chance of seeing the first writing (paleolitic) more clearly. This is the second time I have encountered it when you posted, and not being able to see it is very frustrating. Thanks also for the long list of references.

[Renfield]

Linear B, widely recognized as an early form of Greek, dates from ~1600BC.

[muawiyah]

Look, every thing you ever read about Middle Eastern archaeology got turned on its head with the discoveries at "Gobekli Tepe" 18 years ago. Several of the sites have been dug up. Analysis have been made of all sorts of stuff.

It's useful to read through the various pieces about that site because there are hundreds of pictures and they'll give you an idea of the QUALITY of the work. Most of it is up to the standards you can see in today's Hirschorn Gallery in DC.

So, one more time:

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	Animal	Type	Action
1	Bustard	Bird	Largest Flying Bird
2	Crane	Bird	Life ~ Start of
3	Crow	Bird	Wise
4	Eagle	Bird	Hunter – in sky
5	Vulture	Bird	Life – End of
6	Boar	Game	Horn
7	Bull	Game	Horn ~ Strong
8	Deer	Game	Horn
9	Gazelle	Game	Horn ~ Fast
10	Horse	Game	No Horn - strong
11	Rabbit	Game	No Horn - weak
12	Sheep	Game	No Horn
13	Canine	Predator	No Horn
14	Cat	Predator	Hunter ~ on land

 

 

Göbekli Tepe ~ in the National Geo article someone bothered to report on how many different "kinds" of animals were shown in one way or the other on the 15,000 different carvings.

 

Think about it ~ that's a HUGE COLLECTION of stonework dwarfing every public exhibit on Earth.

 

This was put together by Paleolithic people.

 

No doubt it was as important to them as the Louvre, Hermitage, Smithsonian, etc. are to us.

 

So, I took the counts of animals and looked to see if there were patterns that would reflect more recent totem lists.

 

We have many societies before ours that had assigned totems, and virtually all of them used groups of 12 with subgroups of 3 and 4, 2 and 6. 

 

Even Wales was so militarized in its multicentury effort to keep out the Saxons and others after the coming of the Dark Ages that they ended up with 12 primary clan/family surnames.

 

The Irish had less pressure until they arrived in Alba (now Scotland) and then involvement with the Vikings also settling there resulted in a similar sort of structuring of Scottish clans.

 

There were 12 Greek tribes (traditionally), and we all know about the 12 tribes of Israel, and also the 12 tribes of the descendants of Ishmael, and a couple of others. 

 

What a clan does is minimize the destruction to society that occurs with the ever inevitable inter tribal warfare found in low tech agrarian societies of hunters and gathers.

 

When the battle is over it's not just the tribe's responsibility to bury the dead warriors (and others) it's also his totemic "clan brothers" who may well be found in the victorious tribe.  Everybody gets to share in the cleanup.  We do not, if we can avoid it, leave dead bodies around to feed the big cats.

 

Totems are animals with specific characteristics.  You have the Eagle, sharp of eye, flying over everything, and on the ground his competitor ~ the (small) cat ~ it also hunts silently, by stealth, and at night. It hunts the same game as the Eagle ~ small rodents!  That's the characteristic that makes Eagles and small cats respected!

 

BTW, I found both the cat and the eagle in the list of animals whose pictures are found in profusion at that temple site.

 

These folks, BTW, didn't have any BIG CATS ~ they probably still told stories about sabertoothed tigers and they sure didn't want one of those guys coming out of the stones.  In fact, the people who built the first "sky boxes" for the vultures here may have been among those who exterminated the last big cats in that region (11,000 years ago).

 

I found the list had 4 kinds of horned mammals.  I found the list had 4 kinds of non-horned mammals.  Presumably, given that time frame, ALL of those mammals were looked upon as game ~ including horses and dogs ~ and most likely PARTICULARLY dogs since they don't have horns!

 

There were 4 additional kinds of birds ~ the LARGEST FLYING BIRD, the bird that brings life (crane/stork story), the bird that takes away the remains of death (buzzard, culture), and the wisest bird.

 

So, we have three groups of 4 different groupable totems.  We have the Eagle and the Cat bracketing them as "special spirits" ~

 

That gives 14 totemic animals and that's sufficient for COUNTING, determining seniority within a tribe (assuming you can move through the totem cults to senior positions), and probably identifying relative age at death PLUS whether or not someone was honored, e.g. like a tribal chieftain or a totemic or clan elder or shaman.

 

You can see what i discovered in those counts.  BTW, the guys doing the counting found two different kind of "deer".  I didn't differentiate by species ~ but instead by "form" or "kind" ~ which is what I figure the ancients were into.  They Fur Shur weren't writing science books.  They were, instead, praying for food, and seeking the spirits of the totems to aid them in their struggle for survival.

 

Since they used a base 14 it matters that there are 7 game animals in the list, and 7 non-game animals.  That enables you to add up to 14, or maybe MULTIPLY.  Could be interesting to see more of the art work to see if there are arrays of animals that can be construed to mean NUMBERS or Counts, plus appellations giving you something like "Old 46" rather like the way so many of those ancient Mayan names translate out!

 

                        Animal                        Type      Action

1                    Bustard                 Bird          Largest Flying Bird

2                    Crane                         Bird          Life ~ Start of

3                    Crow    Bird          Wise

4                    Eagle Bird          Hunter – in sky

5                    Vulture                     Bird          Life – End of

6                    Boar      Game  Horn

7                    Bull         Game  Horn ~ Strong

8                    Deer      Game  Horn

9                    Gazelle                     Game  Horn ~ Fast

10               Horse Game  No Horn - strong

11               Rabbit Game  No Horn - weak

12               Sheep                       Game  No Horn

13               Canine                     Predator                 No Horn

14               Cat            Predator                 Hunter ~ on land

 

Since you have an interest in this particular archaeological site I thought I'd let you in on my first attempt to decipher what the ancients were telling us with their 15,000 carvings (so far ~ gotta' be 20 times that in that hillside).

[muawiyah]

In all cases the RUNIC "X" is pronounced like a raspy "H", or a soft clearing of the throat.

That way a Scanderhoovian could ADOPT Gaelic words as they were pronounced without inventing a new spelling for them.

And vice versa!