Free Republic

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...

The project, called Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing Systems (CREWS)... is led by Dr Philippa Steele of the University's Faculty of Classics... For instance, today the notion of "alphabetical order" is used to arrange everything from dictionaries to telephone books, but why is the alphabet organised the way it is? Alphabetical order as we would recognise it first appeared over three thousand years ago in Ugaritic, written in a cuneiform script made of wedge-shaped signs impressed on clay tablets. The Ugaritic alphabet was in use in the ancient city of Ugarit, uncovered at Ras Shamra in modern Syria....

April 28, 2006Cornell study of ancient volcano, seeds and tree rings, suggests rewriting Late Bronze Age Mediterranean history By Alex Kwan Separated in history by 100 years, the seafaring Minoans of Crete and the mercantile Canaanites of northern Egypt and the Levant (a large area of the Middle East) at the eastern end of the Mediterranean were never considered trading partners at the start of the Late Bronze Age. Until now. Trenchmaster Vronwy Hankey and foreman Antonis Zidianakis excavate storage jars from the Minoan settlement Myrtos-Pyrgos. The jars were analyzed in the Cornell study using radiocarbon analyses. Cultural links between...