on the transmission of the alphabet to the aegean before 1400 b. c

On the Transmission of the Alphabet to the Aegean before 1400 B. C.Author(s): Martin BernalSource: Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, No. 267 (Aug., 1987), pp. 1-19Published by: The American Schools of Oriental ResearchStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1356964Accessed: 08/02/2009 12:51

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On the Transmission of the Alphabet to the Aegean Before 1400 B.C.*

MARTIN BERNAL

Department of Government Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853

This article argues that Rhys Carpenter's date of ca. 700 and Naveh's of the 11th century B.C. for the transmission of the Semitic alphabet to Greece, are both far too low. New finds of early inscriptions in North Arabic scripts, notably that at Kamid el-Loz, revive the hypothesis proposed by Praetorius at the beginning of the century, that the so-called "new letters" in the Greek alphabet derive from ones found in Thamudic and Safaitic, for consonants that merged in Canaanite. As these letters seem to have disappeared from the Phoenician coast by the 14th century B.C., it is argued that the alphabet must have been transmitted to Greece before then. Further, the hypothesis of an earlier date removes many anomalies of the present schemes and makes possible a general theory for the many alphabets and alphabetically-based scripts that are found around the Mediterranean and beyond.

The Phoenicians who came with Cadmus... introduced into Greece after their settlement of the country, a number of accomplishments, of which the most important was writing, an art till then, I think, unknown to the Greeks. At first they used the same characters as the other Phoe- nicians, but as time went on they changed their language, they also changed the shape of their letters. At that period most of the Greeks in the neighbourhood were Ionians; they were taught these letters by the Phoenicians and adopted them, with a few alterations for their own use, continuing to refer to them as the Phoenician characters ((potvtKltia).... In the temple of the Ismenian Apollo at Thebes in Boeotia I have myself seen cauldrons with inscriptions cut on them in Cadmean characters-most of them not very different from the Ionian.

(Histories, Vol. 58 trans A. de Selincourt 1972: 361).

O ther sources associated the introduction of the alphabet with Egypt and specifically with the colonizing of Argos by Danaos,

e.g., Hekataios, (Jacoby 1923-29; vol. 1:12, frag. 20). However, Danaos himself had Hyksos and hence Semitic connections (Astour 1967: 9-112). Thus there is no doubt that the alphabet had a general association in antiquity with Cadmus and the Phoenicians (Jeffery 1982: 819). Ancient chro-

nographers differed in their dating of the arrival of these legendary colonizers. The Parian Marble put them in the 16th century B.c.; other sources put them somewhat later (Edwards 1979: 163-74). These dates were generally accepted until the end of the last century when the time of transmission began to be lowered (McCarter 1975: 1-12, 17- 18, nn. 45-47). In 1933, Carpenter proposed a date around 720 B.C., giving the following reasons: 1) the earliest Greek letters resembled those of eighth century Phoenician; 2) no Greek inscriptions had been found from before that date (Carpenter 1933: 8-29).

"ANCIENT" AND "ARYAN" MODELS

This lowering must be seen in the context of classical scholarship as a whole, and of European intellectual, social, and economic life (below). By the fifth century B.C., most Greeks perceived their history in a framework that can usefully be called the "ancient model," according to which Greece had been settled and civilized by Egyptians and

* More details on the theme of this article will be found in Bernal: The Cadmean Letters: The Westward Diffusion of the Semitic Alphabet Before 1400 B.C.

1

MARTIN BERNAL

Phoenicians around the middle of the second millennium B.C. This view went without serious challenge until the 1820s and it was not until the 1840s that a coherent new picture emerged; that of an Indo-European or Aryan invasion from the north, which was completely unattested in ancient literature. Furthermore, the "Aryan model" was in place before the decipherment of Egyptian and Babylonian texts was accepted by classicists and before Schliemann's discovery of Mycenaean civilization. Thus the new model was not the result of these new sources of information. It was the framework into which they were placed (Bernal 1986: 29-54; 1987: 308-16).

It is helpful to distinguish between "broad" and "extreme" forms of the Aryan model. The first, from the 1820s, denied ancient traditions that reported Egyptian settlement but accepted those that concerned the Phoenicians. Indeed, Phoe- nicians gained in reputation as the Egyptians were dismissed. This state of affairs ended in the 1880s and 1890s with the onset of the "extreme Aryan model," which denied any importance to the Phoe- nicians. After some uncertainty in the early 20th century, the extreme model returned with full force in the 1920s. There is little doubt that the change from the ancient to the Aryan model was related to increasing European self-consciousness and confidence deriving from successful expansion into other continents. Similarly, the rise of the extreme Aryan model reflected the growing strength of racial antisemitism. Educated Europeans and North Americans of the time tended to see Greece as the quintessence of Europe and the Phoenicians as very like the Jews.

TWENTIETH CENTURY THEORIES ON THE ORIGIN OF THE GREEK ALPHABET

The historiography of the arrival of the Phoe- nician alphabet in Greece has been central to the establishment of the extreme Aryan model. By the 1920s legends of Phoenician settlement in Greece were largely discredited and nearly all the Semitic

etymologies for Greek names and words had been ruled out (e.g., Cook 1924: 181-237; Gardner and

Cary 1924: 575-76). There remained only the Phoenician alphabet as a remnant of Semitic cultural influence on Greece. It is rewarding to consider studies made in the 1920s and 1930s of the transmission of the alphabet from the Levant to Greece, in light of this "sociology of knowledge."

Major efforts were made to isolate the borrowing of the alphabet and to diminish its importance. First, a categorical distinction was drawn between consonantal and vocalized alphabets. The latter were considered a Greek invention (for doubts on this, see below), the implication being that developing vocalized alphabets was beyond the capacity of Semites (Carpenter 1933: 20). A second effort was made to remove the place of borrowing as far as possible from mainland Greece. Carpenter suggested Crete, Rhodes, and later Cyprus (1933: 29; 1938: 68). In the late 1930s, however, Woolley proposed that there had been an eighth-century Greek colony at Al Mina on the Syrian coast. Despite the tenuousness of this claim and the complete lack of early Greek inscriptions within 500 miles of the site, classicists and archaeologists including Carpenter enthus- iastically accepted this as the point of transmission (Jeffery 1961: 10, n. 3; 11, n. 3).

It is curious that Carpenter, who so strongly needed attestation when it came to time, should have been so lax in regard to place. One reason was that he saw it as more in the "dynamic" Greek character to have taken the alphabet from the Middle East rather than to have received it

passively in the Aegean. Jeffery, who was Carpen- ter's leading successor, has summarized another reason. "The second point was well brought out by Professor Carpenter: that only in an established bilingual settlement of the two peoples, not merely a casual Semitic trading post somewhere in the Greek area, will the alphabet of one be taken over by the other" (Jeffery 1961: 7).

In this reconstruction, it is axiomatic that Semitic colonization was categorically more casual and temporary than that of the Greeks, a conten- tion for which there is little ancient authority. The reason for insisting on the small scale and trans-

itory nature of Phoenician settlements seems largely ideological. They had to be so if Greece were to remain the racially pure childhood and

quintessence of Europe. As Bury wrote in his A

History of Greece, which was still standard until the 1970s, "The Phoenicians doubtless had marts here and there on coast and island; but there is no reason to think that Canaanites ever made homes for themselves on Greek soil or introduced Semitic blood into the population of Greece"

(Bury 1900: 77). Thus alphabet transmission was unwelcome in

Greece because it would require substantial Phoe-

2 BASOR 267

TRANSMISSION OF THE ALPHABET TO THE AEGEAN

nician settlement and hence racial mixing. The third way to diminish the significance of

the borrowing was to lower its date. By his extremely risky positing of the late eighth century, Carpenter was able to claim that the essentially passive Phoenicians had been impelled to sail west by the Assyrians (1933: 18). What is more, the late date meant that what Phoenician influence there had been in Greece had come after, not before, the establishment of the polis and the beginning of colonization, two institutions that could be construed as Phoenician (Bernal, in press).

Although Carpenter realized that his late dating required a uniquely rapid spread and diversification of the alphabet throughout not only the Aegean but Italy and Anatolia, he responded, "I hold it worse than absurd. I hold it unGreek and hence unthinkable that it should have lingered for any considerable lapse of time among this in- tensely active people" (1938: 69).

Not all scholars were swept away by this kind of rhetoric. For instance, Jensen, the broadest alphabet scholar of the 20th century, continued to maintain a 10th or 11th century date (1969: 456). However, the only direct challenge to Carpenter came from Ullman, the Semiticist who had pre- viously proposed a date of the 12th century or earlier. Ullman (1934: 359-81) agreed that many archaic Greek letters deviated from the forms on the ninth century Phoenician inscriptions or the Moabite Mesha Stela. But far from resembling later ones, he saw the Greek letters as deriving from earlier Levantine types and he insisted that an alphabet was as old as its oldest letter. He agreed that the letters of the earliest datable Phoe- nician inscription-that on the sarcophagus of Ahiram, king of Byblos-were very similar to the ninth century ones but where they differed the earlier letters were closer to the Greek forms (Ullman 1934: 359-81; fig. 1 here).

In his rejoinder to Ullman, Carpenter (1938: 64-65) implicitly took the position that an alphabet is as recent as its latest letter. Thus he focused on K and M, the Greek forms of which resemble the later Phoenician forms. Although Carpenter did not address Ullman's arguments about the older letters, Ullman could not withstand Car- penter's vigorous style, the relative power of clas- sics and Semitic studies, and the spirit of the age.

Ullman was further undercut by controversy over the dating of the Ahiram inscription. Apparently, archaeologists today do not doubt

Ahiram Mesha Samos Marsillana Formello 13th 9th 7th 8th or 7th 7th

I

YY

4

)

I 9

1-i

I I

Y y I

Nrt

0

Z. h-Y L

4q w Xq+

A a 1 .4 3 -4

1

:k.o

0 -9

A 8

1

0

9

0 I

J

i EB O

q

y

A B 4 D

I

I1

/ /V

0 p

9 p 3

r V

(P

Fig. 1. Phoenician and Greek alphabets.

Montet's initial opinion (1928: 143-238) that the royal tomb in which it was found should be dated to the 13th century B.C. In the 1920s, palaeographers, including Albright, accepted this date. During the 1930s and 1940s, however, Albright gradually lowered his dating until he reached the first half of the tenth century. The reasons for this shift are debatable (Garbini 1977: 81-89). But the result was clear, and by 1950 there was a sharp dis- junction on dating between archaeologists and epig- raphers. Two compromises have been attempted; Frankfort (1970: 271) argued that while the tomb

1987 3

MARTIN BERNAL

Late Archaic Classical Latin Proto-Canaanite Greek Greek

Variation Variation 1200-1050 B.C.

c94

o o

A7

r

*9 .a ,? 't' f

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

' V A

'A> )

3 a i1 i

I B H

?

;! A 1 4 1

$

1 1 Mt

99

t T vy v

(D Y0 W t X c Y a

;K't'X

A B

r

A, E

z H

O -

K A L

M

N

0 n P

P' I

T Y

x C)

c D

F G'

J

Q R S

u,v.w - XI

Y Z

'G is variation of C. 2X from Greek E.

Fig. 2. Late Canaanite and Archaic Greek alphabets (from Naveh 1982: 180, fig. 162).

and the sarcophagus were 13th century, the inscription was later; while Porada (1973: 354-65) maintained that the tomb was 13th century but the sarcophagus was introduced in the tenth.

In 1977 Garbini tackled the problem in the light of archaeology, art history, epigraphy, language, and historiography. He showed that there is nothing in the epigraphy to prevent a 13th century date. Even more impressive, he demonstrated that the language of the inscription shares many features of Ugaritic not present in the biblical

Hebrew or Phoenician of the first millennium (Garbini 1977: 87-88). Garbini's position was confirmed in a paper by Gates at a meeting of the American Oriental Society (1984), in which she showed that there was a connection between the inscription and the relief on the sarcophagus, both of which are clearly Late Bronze Age. The significance of the 13th century date for Ahiram will be discussed below; but in the 1940s and 1950s Ullman's reliance on it discredited his arguments among both classicists and the dominant school of Semiticists. This assured the triumph of Car- penter's low dating and indirectly that of the extreme Aryan model as a whole.

ALPHABET STUDIES SINCE 1945

After 1945, the ideological underpinnings of anti-Phoenicianism were severely shaken by the revelation of the consequences of anti-Semitism but scientism and skepticism were unscathed and most scholars continued to work within the extreme Aryan model. In the last 20 years, however, they have been goaded into some reconsideration by the rise of Israel, by Gordon's and Astour's work, and by an increasing number of Canaanite and early Phoenician finds in the Aegean (Bass 1967; Sznyzer 1979; Helm 1980). On the alphabet the challenge has come from Naveh's article, "Some Semitic Epigraphical Considerations on the Antiquity of the Greek Alphabet" (1973: 1-8). Working entirely from epigraphy, Naveh argued that the uncertain direction of early Greek inscriptions resembled not the regular right to left of Phoenician but the irregularities of Canaanite. Similarly the stances of a number of Greek letters, notably A and X, were not those of Phoenician but paralleled those of an earlier period. He further maintained that the archaic Greek H and O resembled the Canaanite, not the Phoenician forms and that A, E, N, , nI, 9, P, and possibly O could be more plausibly derived from late Canaanite of the 12th century than from Phoe- nician (fig. 2).

Naveh admitted difficulties with K and M. Despite these complications he is convinced that the bulk of the evidence points toward a borrowing from before the standardization of the Phoenician alphabet. Accepting an early tenth century date for Ahiram, Naveh (1973: 7-8) cautiously put the transmission only some 50 years earlier, in the mid-l lth century.

4 BASOR 267


Orhon Yanissey

Ls

Hungarian

Numidian

TF

Tifineh

Arcadian Attic Boeotian Bastulo Turdetanian Corinthian Dorian Euboean

Fig. 3. Locations of ancient alphabets.

As is usual with breakthroughs, Naveh received very little direct response, but he transformed the debate. Most classicists had already been convinced of the ninth century date by new discoveries of early inscriptions (McCarter 1975: 19-26). American Semiticists, led by Cross, hesitated for a few years. McCarter tried to find a compromise between Naveh and Carpenter concluding with the uncertain declaration that, "while the Greeks may have begun to experiment with Phoenician writing as early as the 11th century B.C., they did not, for whatever reason, develop a true independent tradition until the beginning of the eighth century. The Greek system, therefore, is best described as descended from a Phoenician prototype of ca. 800 B.C." (McCarter 1975: 126).

Despite his protestations of orthodoxy and his apparent acceptance of Carpenter, McCarter did in fact concede Naveh's argument.

Since 1980, encouraged by new finds of Canaan- ite "Greeklike" inscriptions in Israel, notably those

from Izbet Sartah, Cross has come to accept Naveh's position (1980: 1-21) and in this, he has been supported by de Hoz (1983: 47-48). Thus we now have a division between the classicists, who maintain a date of ca. 800 B.C., and a dominant school of Semiticists who hold that the date is around 1100 B.C. In this article it is argued that both are far too low.

DIFFICULTIES WITH CONTEMPORARY THEORIES

A 13th century date for Ahiram undercuts Naveh's l1th century date for transmission. Furthermore, his assumption of more or less unilinear progress from proto-Canaanite to Phoe- nician requires modification. While it is clear that Palestine was using a Canaanite alphabet in the 12th century, some similar "pre-Phoenician" features can be seen in the alphabet from Tell

Key: Ar At B BT C D E

GI

IS KL L TF

Greco-Iberian lonian Izbet Sarteh Kamid el Loz Lemnian Tel Fekheriye

5 1987

MARTIN BERNAL

Pre Sabellic Messapic

A&V

8W R E

I B-t 1Q

K

WD

rnLr M

a

b

g d

e

v

z h

th

k

I

m

n

s/sc

0 o

P

S

q

r

s

t

u

ph

kh

f

3(h)

t(th)

AA

k E Fk : rC IT

?0 I K

A

t N +x oo? rnr- '1 ?TCa PPR TSC TT TL>

Tl

A&W4'

X (f:

Fig. 4. Early Italian alphabets.

Fekheriye, 200 kilometers inland on t] Turkish border; and this alphabet has tatively dated to the ninth century. plausible that outlying areas responded rates to the innovations made on the I coast.

Taking the terminus ante quem of trz as the establishment of the Phoenician and the knowledge that it became st different parts of Syro-Palestine over 1300-850 B.C., it becomes important tl the place in the Levant from which tt alphabets are likely to have come. It is

Etruscan implausible to suggest rural Palestine or Eastern A Syria. Thus Naveh and Cross both seem absolutely

right pace Millard, Bordreuil, and Kaufman, to rule out any point after the establishment of the

>D (k) Phoenician alphabet on the coast (Millard and Bordreuil 1982: 140; Kaufman 1982: 143).

~3 ~ It is much more difficult to pinpoint any par- ticular Phoenician city as the site of origin.

I According to many reports, Cadmus came from

a y ~ Tyre (Edwards 1979: 46-47). Tyre was also eco-

%0 nomically and politically the leading city in the ninth and eighth centuries, and thus would seem a likely candidate if the borrowing were late. If the alphabet came somewhat earlier-from, say, the

J] ~12th to the 9th centuries-Sidon, which is also + A mentioned, though less frequently, in traditions II about Cadmus (Edwards 1979: 46-47) would be

the likely site of origin. Sidon was "the" Phoe- nician city for Homer and the Bible.

1 If the transmission of the Phoenician alphabet took place in the Bronze Age it would almost certainly have been through Byblos. There is con-

1 firmatory evidence for this from the fact that a q byblos or biblos meant "papyrus scroll" or "writ-

~ 3 ing" in Greek. In any event it is plausible that the { western alphabets were transmitted before the 13th

YVl century either because they came from Byblos or 4b ~ because the "Ahiram alphabet" was basically that

N\lY of Tyre and Sidon as well. s Evidence from the west also raises questions

about the hypothesis of an 11th-century date. First, Herodotus' claim (v. 59-62) that he saw "Cadmean" inscriptions at Thebes from before the Trojan War (ca. 1200 B.c.) seems to be supported by Pseudo-Aristotle (Mira. 133). Herodotus may have been lying or mistaken but nonetheless his testimony should not be summarily dismissed. Second, there are the large number of alphabetic dialects found in 7th century Greece. Analogies

he Syrian- with alphabetic divergence elsewhere suggest that been ten- these dialects would have taken at least 500 to 600

Thus it is years to develop. The diversity is greatest among at varying the so-called "new letters," those after Y, which Phoenician have no Phoenician parallels.

These new letters provide a third problem, since ansmission they were present from Italy to Anatolia by 700 i alphabet, B.C. Such rapid invention, dispersion, and varia- Landard in tion seems to call Carpenter's and Naveh's schemes the period into question. o consider Even more serious objections to the lower dates he western come from the many other alphabetic scripts extremely found around the Mediterranean, few of which

6 BASOR 267

I


have been considered in relation to the question of transmission (fig. 3). Apart from the difficulties caused by their very number and variety, many of them make an 11th century date especially difficult to accept. There are, for example, the extraordinary transcriptions of Anatolian letters into Greek and Egyptian (Friedrich 1957: 107). The most plausible explanation for these is that the former retained their early spellings but were written more or less phonetically in foreign scripts. Such a situation requires that the alphabet have been introduced, an orthography fixed, and sound- shifts taken place. All of these accomplishments take considerable time.

Another problem is that the Phrygian and Lydian alphabets in northwest Anatolia shared with Etruscan a peculiar letter 8 with a value f (Jensen 1969: 512-13; Brixhe and Drew-Bear 1982: 77-78). In addition, the Etruscan alphabet resembles that of the northern Aegean island of Lemnos, an alphabet that was used for a closely related language. Many scholars have postulated an alphabet dialect cluster of Lydian, Etruscan, Lemnian, and Phrygian. (Jeffery 1961: 299; Jensen 1969: 473). Given the ancient traditions that the Etruscans came from northwest Anatolia (Buona- mici, 1939: 92-95) and the plausible linking of their migration to that of the Trs in the invasions of "the Sea Peoples" reported by the Egyptians in the 13th and 12th centuries (Gardiner 1964: 271), the most likely explanation of the dialect cluster may be that the Trs/ Etruscans were already using an alphabet in this period. This is certainly a much less cumbersome supposition than the others that have been proposed (Sommer 1930: 1-7; Hammarstrom 1931: 92-95). A higher dating would also explain the considerable diversification of Etruscan alphabets in Italy and the Alps and would fit the theories of a very early origin of the Germanic runes from these alphabets (Jensen 1969: 567-73; Pittioni 1941: 373-84).

Both tradition and inscriptions indicate that there were other alphabets in Italy, some of which contain features unknown in Canaanite, Phoeni- cian, or Greek but found in many unexpected places (fig. 4). For instance, East Italic contains a sign [t or 4, which is given the value s or f (Whatmough: 1933: 224, 248). In Runic the letter f the origin of which scholars are unable to explain, isp (fig. 5). Turkic alphabets from Siberia and a version of the Old Hungarian alphabet used the same letter for b (fig. 6). In Spain the alphabet

Common Nordic (later) runes Germanic runes

Danish Swedish-

Rune netic runes Norwegian Phonetic Na 9th- I th runes 9th- value

vaue centuries 10th cents.

r r r r f fp A n kkh u, ow itr

P ~ a q i ,,d <asd

R R r KR r rei

(< k I\ k r .ngr k,g,ng kaun

X g, r

P P w IM IL h $ t h hagall

. n F n na. "

I . I I I, C iss

(2 h l c}1/1 a tI 1 I, w t, p

tY ,k/s -2,-,B S , H H I s sol

?B 9 t M n

pi O cao1

N H II A

b

c

m

9(nig)

I,

I

ypq r

T 1

,k.

t, d, nd

p, b, mb

I,t

tyr

bjarkan

I ,gr

/I

Fig. 5. Runic alphabets (from Jensen 1969: 367, fig. 343).

syllabary called Iberian gave this same symbol the value be (fig. 7). In Numidia it was p orf (fig. 8). In Thamudic and in an inscription from a seventh- century B.C. south Arabian site it is readf(Jamme 1969: 354; fig. 9), probably the value of the same letter found on 14th century ostraca from inland Lebanon (Mansfeld 1970: 29-41; pls. 4, 8; fig. 10 here).

The fact that these letters come from very different periods-1400 B.C. to A.D. 1400-does not alter the significance of the geographical pattern i.e., that all around the periphery there are similar forms for identical or closely related sound values,

7 1987

MARTIN BERNAL

Pho- Pho- Orhon Ycnisey nctic Orhon Yenisey netic

value value

l4 r

D

ad 6

A J33

J

?

Y Oo f

b .> 0

A 'r

33 I

J v Y

a (a)

c

i i

o U

du

i' b'

bl

bs

d'

to

d'

di

VI

k

It

Id lt

rf

1 OA

4J

4

I

hh /frP

>P

1'

tr

I ATr o A

h h1 +?^^

m

n'

It

nj

nd nj

nt nd

P

ql 9I'

qi qt

oq u9 9o qu

rl*

r'

'f

i It

'

Fig. 6. Archaic Asian alphabets (from Jensen 1969: 424, fig. 419).

a pattern that a linguistic dialectologist would assume was the result of innovations at the center. In this case the early forms found at the center either have two equal legs as with the Greek I or the Ugaritic =, or they have one leg shorter than the other, F. Both can easily be simplifications of f/. There is even a link, the form r. found in the earliest Ionian abecedary' and in the otherwise archaic Messapic alphabet of Apulia.

Another peculiar letter in this alphabet is a "trident" t or th, which seems to derive from an early letter with or without the middle stroke breaking through, with similar sounds, found around the periphery from the Ethiopic tet (, to Anatolia and Spain. This, too, appears to be the remains of a substratum, which antedates the 13th century when the first "closed tets" are attested.

If Carpenter and Naveh fail to explain anomalies in the Italic scripts, their timetables are

completely unable to cope with the Spanish syllabaries. These are made up of alphabetic vowels, liquids, and sibilants. The stops are vocalized: ba, be, bi, bo, bu, etc. These are made up of vowels, liquids, and sibilants. Most of the letters and a few of the syllables can be identified with Phoe- nician and Greek letters but many cannot. This peculiarity has led some scholars to hypothesize a native script onto which an alphabet was grafted (Jensen 1969: 38). The dominant school, however, sees the older elements as having come from oriental syllabaries during the second millennium (Maluquer de Motes 1968: 15). The theory is based on the progressivist assumption that syllabaries must precede alphabets. It seems more likely in this case, however, that the opposite took place. Both Etruscan and early Roman writers tended to use redundant letters syllabically (Jensen 1969: 525). In both Spain and Italy these were plentiful: the dominant languages had merged their stops into a single series. In Spain there seem to have been still further resources in archaic letters no longer used in Phoenician and Greek. Hence the Iberian be from the ancient p. Similarly its te and to could well have come from an outmoded "open tet."

Historians dispute the date of the Phoenicians' first settlement in Spain. Classicists still prefer a low date but Semiticists and Spanish historians now go as high as the 1 lth century B.C. (Maluquer de Motes 1968: 17; 1970: 71-76; Blazquez 1975: 11-58; Cross 1979: 108-11). Thus the older Spanish signs probably antedate the 11th century B.C. A similar situation exists in North Africa. Neither the Numidian alphabet nor the Tifineh still used by the Tuaregs in the southern Sahara resembles Phoenician or Punic (fig. 8). These too, may come from a substratum earlier than the 11th century.

All of this evidence mitigates against an 11th century date of transmission for Greece. Such a date cannot contain major anomalies in Anatolia and Italy and it is completely unable to handle the more remote alphabets.

ALTERNATIVE HYPOTHESES

To provide a better and more comprehensive scheme, changes of both model and time scale are

proposed here.

8 BASOR 267


Bastulo Turdetano 4

Iberico Bastulo Turdetano 4

RP?P E5 -

I rA/ i

r YYVuT

I

I $^

a&.

e t

0

t ~.

m

bo, be

O09

1

ml/i q~r qq

(r4 I

rTr

Pr

co

\V US LU

< c Q

O o

6L b~

bo

bu

c,o

ca

CO CA<

q

m*

+X+

AAC

)I DaG(4 A (

(po(f Fig. 7. Early Spanish syllabaries (from Gomez-Moreno 1962: 75).

New Model

The diffusion of alphabets should be seen as a series of impulses from a first center in the Levant and other epicenters crossing and overlapping each other. It is impossible to plot such developments on a "tree." Thus it is more useful to trace-as with linguistic isoglosses-the "isographs" for par- ticular letter forms, stances, directions, etc. This has been attempted above with p and t.

New Time Scale

The latest period for the initial spread is the middle of the second millennium B.C. This could be linked to Egyptian expansion in the Middle Kingdom 2100-1750 B.C., but more plausibly to the Hyksos, Egypto-Canaanite conquests in the Aegean which, according to the ancient model, formed the basis of Mycenaean civilization (Bernal 1987: 16-46, 84-103). In Italy it would be associated with the considerable Aegean influence in the

Late Bronze Age (Pugliese Carratelli 1976: 243- 61) and in Spain with the arrival before 1500 B.C. of the El Argar people, who clearly had Anatolian and Aegean connections (Cerda 1979: 381-86; Daniel and Evans 1975: 756-69).

In accord with McCarter's thesis (1975: 123-26) two major waves of Levantine influence are postulated here; but their dates are seen as several hundred years earlier. The second major wave would have come with the Phoenician expansion from the 10th to the 9th centuries, hence before, not after, the Greek, Italian, and Iberian urban- ization on the Phoenician pattern. It is hypothe- sized that new letters were introduced during this period and that major alphabetic reorganizations were undertaken.

Disadvantages of the New Hypotheses

Adopting these new hypotheses has a number of disadvantages. First, the wave model is less simple and elegant than that of a tree. However,

Iberico~I Iberico -

_ 'n-- _

9 1987

MARTIN BERNAL

Numldian phonetic Numidlan phonetic Berber value Brber value

hortz. perp. horz. perp.

0

z -- z

OD

DC lill 1111 II

H I

m NZ 1t

nuA

I: .

3 EW 3

9 (alpha)

b g d h

z z

t t h t, d

k

II 30

X

X

O

=D

11 I

El II X 8

111 ?1, XX6

00 ?:E

-4- Lul

0 0

3 Z

I

n s s2

g (y) p(f)

q g r

t t2

Fig. 8. Archaic alphabets from the Magreb (from Jensen 1969: 155, fig. 118).

Thamudic Sabaean Early Ethiopic

n I

Q) Y (D

A

1

0

17 o<

ES

x

a

i1 n

0 4*H

YY ea H

mT

[Dm

T

8~ Ih

0

0

)t

o--o

> hfi b nn c Do d oo ct q d" ^ h yy W 098B0 Z T1 h rnm'I h X t mrM3

d - y ? k fl I 91L

m J) n il

S Alf

n 4*'

d 0

r )( S. t + t s

Standard Ethiopic

n

u U a) H

rT

P

A

n

4 cp) A(p)T

9

Fig. 9. South Semitic alphabets.

the earlier clarity was only achieved by drastic pruning and by neglecting masses of data. Besides which, as in linguistics, in the exploration of origins the informational value of alphabets bears no relation to their success. Hence for example, the Messapic alphabet of Apulia can provide as much information as the Roman.

The greatest loss is that of attestation. The new timetable requires hundreds if not thousands of years of "silence," not merely in Greece but throughout the alphabetic region. It will surely be argued that the proposed changes will move alphabet studies from a "positive science" into a "field of mere speculation." However, in this case positivism and the requirement of "proof" are inappropriate. The best one can hope for in such areas is competitive plausibility. Furthermore, the "argument from silence" is an extraordinarily un- reliable tool. Proof from absence is not a pro- cedure approved of in natural sciences and it would be laughed out of court by the "new archaeologists" (Binford 1981: 195-208). In Greece we cannot even be sure how long the silence is, since large numbers of what are apparently the most archaic texts are undatable, and we have the testimony of Herodotus and Pseudo-Aristotle that there were alphabet inscriptions from before the Trojan War (Herodotus V.58-62; Pseudo- Aristotle, Mira. 133).

Nevertheless, the new model does require substantial gaps. There are, however, comparable lacunae. We know from the Bible that there was extensive literacy in Early Iron Age Israel, although remarkably little evidence of it was found for many years (Schmidt 1920: 67-68). Further- more, rainfall is low there and, unlike archaeologists in the Aegean, those in the Levant have expected to find such traces and have more or less known what to look for. In Cyprus there is a gap of more than 500 years in the attestation of the local syllabary and in Crete, one of over a millennium, for Linear A (Gordon 1966: 13; Duhoux 1982: 101-11). A number of scholars have made a plausible case for a "Tyrrhenian Syllabary" exist- ing in Anatolia and Italy for a thousand years, something that has never been attested. They have simply found this hypothesis the only way to explain otherwise inexplicable phenomena in other scripts (Slotty 1952: 76-92; Wetter 1936: 114-33; Pfiffig 1963: 144-49; Lejeune 1967: 40-59).

Another objection to the new model is that the Aegean syllabaries or linear scripts ruled out the

10 BASOR 267


need for, or the likelihood of, an alphabet. Yet there have been many biscriptural societies from Egypt to Japan. The survival of one script but not another is also fairly common. In Mesopotamia there is massive attestation of cuneiform and very little of the Aramaic alphabet. It is only in rainless Egypt that the less formal-though regular- scripts of daily use still survive. If similar destruc- tions had taken place in Japan, there would have been plentiful evidence of kanji used on stone and coins but very little of kataka or hiragana. In the Late Bronze Age Aegean the only attestation we have is on clay. However, we now know from Bass's sensational discoveries from the Kas shipwreck, that folded wax "note books" of the type standard in classical antiquity were in use in the Aegean in the 14th century B.C. (David Owen, personal communication 9/3/1986). This explains Bellerophon's nivai nTZcKTOg, "folded tablet," on which according to Homer the OrilmaTa kuypa, "sinister signs or letters," were "written" (Iliad 6.169). Although these could have been written in any linear script, the new find indicates that there was "casual" writing in the region in the Late Bronze Age and that there is no reason to suppose that our knowledge of the scripts used there at the time is complete.

The only substantive disadvantage of adopting the new model that the alphabet was introduced before 1400 B.C. is that such a model cannot explain why the Greek Cypriots used a native syllabary rather than the alphabet. This is not a problem for the present model. If the alphabet had been introduced in the 10th or the 9th century B.C., Greek migrants to the island in the 13th could not have brought it with them. Explanations can be found in terms of the new model but they are much more cumbersome. This loss of explan- atory power is far outweighed by the benefits of the proposed new model. Not only does this cope with most of the anomalies in the old model, but it explains many peripheral forms that have so far been inexplicable. Before attempting to explain it, however, it will be useful to consider the hypothetical "alphabet of primary transmission."

The Alphabet of Primary Transmission

There is no doubt that the pictographic Sinai alphabet is both very old and in some way related to other alphabets. Nevertheless, the relationship is not direct and the reading of the letters is

extremely uncertain. In any event we are concerned here not with the Uralphabet but with the alphabet or alphabets in use on the Phoenician coast in the middle of the second millennium. The best indications seem to come from the Ugaritic and Thamudic alphabets. The former contains almost the whole inventory of protosemitic consonants. It is generally recognized that although Ugaritic was stamped in cuneiform, it was based on a linear alphabet. Thus, although its letters cannot indicate the precise forms of their proto- types, some may provide rough approximations of them. (Fevrier 1934: 13-16; Gordon 1967: 4.2) An Ugaritic abecedary gives information on letter order; a partial list of letter names helps in this area, too.

The Thamudic alphabet belongs to a group generally known as South Semitic. This forms by far the most informative sector of the periphery. These alphabets are particularly conservative, partly because many of them were used in remote deserts but more because the Arabic and south Arabian languages they represented seem to have been closer than any others to those spoken in the Levant in the early second millennium B.C. Thus their letters have better phonetic correspondences to those of the original forms than do those of Canaanite, Greek, and Anatolian.

It used to be thought that the South Semitic alphabets were enlargements of the "original" 22-letter Phoenician alphabet, but expanded to accommodate greater consonantal ranges. This theory has now been discounted because the "extra" letters in the archaic South Semitic alphabets are known now to be independent forms, not Phoenician or Canaanite ones with diacritical marks, and also because, unlike the vocalized 'aleps and an anomalous s, the "extra" consonants were fully integrated into the Ugaritic abecedary. Thus, linguists now generally concede that the 22-letter alphabet is a reduction of a larger one of 27 or 28 letters (Garbini 1979: 38, n. 24; Naveh 1982: 30-32). The best known South Semitic alphabets are the Ethiopic ones and the Sabaean or Minaean one of the great kingdoms of south Arabia. While there is no doubt that they- especially the Ethiopic-have many archaic features, scholars agree that the North Arabic and South Semitic scripts are still more ancient (Jensen 1969: 337-52).

From 1930 to 1970, scholars tended to see the origins of these alphabets in the seventh or sixth

1987 11

MARTIN BERNAL

century B.C. This assumption has been called into question by the discovery of an 11th century monogram in south Arabia (Jamme 1969: 354), by letters from Baluca in Jordan with a 12th century date (Ward and Martin 1964: 5-28), and by the 14th century ostraca from Lebanon (R6llig and Mansfeld 1970: 265-70). These finds have revived hypotheses proposed early in this century by Grimme that Thamudic should be dated to the second millennium (Jensen 1969: 350-51). Thus, where-as with p and t-Thamudic forms correspond with other peripheral forms, there is a good case for postulating an original letter of that shape. However, because it is easy to become confused between simple signs, Thamudic and peripheral forms can only be related to each other where similar phonetic values have been indepen- dently arrived at. This is the case with the Spanish syllabaries. Hence, the alphabet of primary transmission can be shown to be the "older ingredient x," which with Phoenician and Greek made up the systems that are only attested in Spain from the fourth or fifth century B.C. (Jensen 1969: 293).

THE GREEK ALPHABET

The Letters to Y

Finally we come to the Greek alphabets and consider in detail those letters that are particularly useful indicators of its age and nature.2

A. Naveh (1973: 6) has shown that in both stance and shape the A is pre-Phoenician, and thus I would place the terminus ante quem at 1300 B.C. What phonetic value did A have? In a patchy but important and fascinating article, the historian of ancient art Bundgaard (1965: 1-72) argued the three vocalized 'aleps of Ugaritic represented the earliest Semitic type (1965: 47). This is clearly wrong: not only do they not appear in other Semitic alphabets but 'e/i and 'o/u came at the end of the abecedary and their forms show signs of being derivative. This does not, however, mean that they were not in the alphabet of primary transmission. Thus Bundgaard's suggestion that vocalized 'aleps were used to write Anatolian and Aegean vowels is very plausible. For instance, it is much easier to derive alpha from 'a than from consonantal 'alep.

B. Beta has more variations than any other Greek letter (Jeffery 1961: 23). In Thera it was simply a Phoenician bet. In the rest of the Dorian

south Aegean there were a number of derivatives of pi with archaic "side kicks." The tenaciously conservative, non-Greek-speaking Eteocretans em- ployed a B (Duhoux 1982: 101-11) as did all the non-Dorian Greeks.

The b sound did not exist in early Greek. It does not appear in linear B, and b's found in the later language either come in loan words or derive from the Indo-European gW, which became b in most contexts after the breakdown of the labiovelars. If, as is maintained here, the alphabet were introduced before this change-and in the initial stages of borrowing from Semitic and Egyptian- there would have been little need for a letter b. For different reasons the same was true in Ana- tolian. Such conditions would explain why the west Semitic b was not successfully transplanted at this early stage.

B does not resemble any Semitic bet, and it seems more likely to derive from the "backed" Semitic mem seen in the Ethiopic P0 and the Sabaean l. This is found throughout south Sem- itic, including Kamid el Loz as well as in southern Spain and Carian, in which, however, it is read as m, b, orp (Ray 1981: 150-62). It is quite plausible to posit the same uncertainty in Late Bronze Age Greece. With the reorganization of the Greek alphabets-postulated here as having taken place in the tenth or ninth century-B was used as b in its proper Phoenician alphabetic and numerical position. In the southern Aegean this uncertain niche was filled either by an archaic pi or by the contemporary Phoenician bet. The gap left in most alphabets by removing the m was filled by the contemporary Phoenician mem. Hence a similarity exists between early mus with ninth and

eighth century Levantine mems to which Carpen- ter (1938: 64-65) rightly drew attention.

E. Both tailed and tailless e's are found all over Greece, Anatolia, and Italy. Palaeographers have assumed that the former were earlier, both because of their closeness to the Phoenician form and because of their imperfection according to the progressivist and teleological view of alphabetic development. However, the Samian abecedary from ca. 660 B.c. has an upright tailless E (fig. 1) and there seems little reason to accept the con- ventional sequence. If the alphabet is to be viewed as having been transmitted from Phoenicia and not Palestine, E can hardly have been exported after the 13th century when tailed e's replaced E on the Levant.

12 BASOR 267


The third or antepenultimate Ugaritic letter V is conventionally transcribed 'e/i. Analogies with neighboring languages, however, suggest that it was simply 'e, which is how Gordon (1967: 5:15- 16; 31) treats it. It is striking, therefore, that E looks remarkably like the E, E, he of Ugaritic and Canaanite, with a diacritical mark. This strengthens Bundgaard's claim (1965: 49-53) that the "Greek" vowels were already present, at least in embryo, in the Ugaritic vocalized 'aleps with waw and yod. Thus, it is probable that the primary Greek borrowing of epsilon came from a vocalic reading of the West Semitic E. The secondary borrowing of the tailed forms shows, however, that the identification with he was never lost.

I. There are basically two forms of this letter around the Mediterranean; the crooked Phoeni- cian yod and the straight I. The isograph separat- ing the two shows that the former occurs in regions including Spain, North Africa, and the Dorian south Aegean known to have been heavily influenced by Phoenicians in the Early Iron Age. Around the periphery one finds the I with or without the "pin head" or dot seen in the South Semitic yod T. The latter was necessary in scripts using| as a word divider or a waw.

The yods of the Late Canaanite abecedary from Izbet Sartah in Palestine have open "pin heads." But the Ahiram form is clearly Phoenician. Thus there is an approximate terminus ante quem of 1300 B.C. for the transmission of the straight I.

There is not enough space here to go into the complexities of the sound value of yod. Note, however, that it is extremely easy for y and w to move from consonant, to glide, to vowel, and back again. There are also indications that they may have been used as glides and vowels in the Late Bronze Age.3 In any event there is no difficulty in deriving vocalic iota from an ostensibly consonantal yod.

K. There is no doubt that this letter resembles Phoenician rather than Canaanite kaps. Naveh has explained this by postulating that earlier Greek had a tailless kappa used for both k and kh but that, "Later, in the ninth century, wishing to differentiate between the two sounds, the Greeks borrowed the contemporary Phoenician kaf... and used it for k: the older form thenceforth denoted kh only" (Naveh 1982: 184).

This is plausible, though an alternative explanation will be discussed under khi.

_. We shall not discuss the complicated ques-

tion of the phonetics of Semitic sibilants and their reception elsewhere.4 Graphically, it is certain that the Greek letter derives from a "four square" or "checkerboard" form. Whether or not Cross is right to see it as the samek on the Izbet Sartah abecedary he is certainly right to posit it as the basic form (1980: 11). Both the E and the Roman X can be seen as abbreviations of this. They cannot come from the Phoenician samek in which, as with the he, the mem, and the qop, the vertical shaft had dropped.

O. Naveh has shown that the early Greek omicrons with a central dot do not come from the Phoenician circle but from the pictographic 'ayin, "eye" with its pupil. This is not invalidated by the dotted forms found at Tell Fekheriye. Thus the transmission of O from the Phoenician coast would antedate the 13th century.

Phonetically there is no doubt of the connection between 'ayin and the back vowels and there is an attestation of its use in Ugaritic as an o (Gordon 1967: 62, 16; Hopkins 1976: 232).

Q. Koppa appeared in most Greek alphabets, and possibly some in Anatolia. Its strongest attestation was in the "Phoenician pale" of Corinth and the southern Aegean, again with the exception of Eteocretan. It derives either from the Canaanite or the Phoenician, both of which had similar

qops. Koppa does not correspond to the South Semitic, probably the pre-Canaanite, form (for which see (D). Thus 9 could have been introduced at any time between 1300 B.C. and 800 B.C.

E. Naveh has shown that this must derive from the Canaanite form before the sin was rotated to become W. Thus it probably was borrowed before 1300 B.C.

The "New Letters"

(. We are now beyond the Canaanite alphabet and into the so-called "new letters." These have provided great difficulty for Carpenter and Jeffery as they are attested in Greek from the beginning of the seventh century B.C. Since no parallels can be found in Linear B or any other ideologically sound environments, they would have to have been invented, acquired dialectically varied shapes and values, and diffused in less than a century. Naveh's positing of an 11th century borrowing is less unacceptable, but he too cannot explain the origin of the "new letters." Furthermore, both schools agree that the most archaic alphabets are

1987 13

MARTIN BERNAL

those from the south Aegean that lack these letters.

The "new letters" can best be explained in terms of the model proposed here. In reality they are not new, but extremely ancient. They existed in the alphabet of primary transmission but were dropped on the Levantine coast in the middle of the second millennium because of graphic changes and the phonetic simplifications in Canaanite (Harris 1939: 29-64; Moran 1961: 58-59). Their extraordinary archaism in Greek came about because, unlike the first 22 letters, they were not under constant pressure to conform to more pres- tigious Canaanite or Phoenician forms.

This is not the first time that it has been proposed that the new letters derive from forms found in South Semitic. Praetorius (1902: 676-80) proposed the connection. It was accepted by Evans (1909: 91-100) who then derived the South Semitic letters from Minoan signs. Dussaud (1907: 57-62) went even farther, by reconciling the obvious sim- ilarities with the antisemitism of the times by proposing that the South Semitic letters came from Greek. Even this kind of speculation became impossible in the late 1920s. Most scholars neg- lected Praetorius' ideas completely while a few dismissed them with ridicule because of the supposed lateness of the Semitic forms (Jensen 1969: 463). Today this theory has been transformed both ideologically and archaeologically, and his hypothesis must again be treated with respect.

On 0, however, Praetorius appears to have been in error. Using the analogy of the derivation of the Latin F from waw, he argued that (D came from the South Semitic "double-circle" waw, seen in the Ethiopic OP and the Sabaean *. While such an origin is plausible for the Phrygian-Lydian- Etruscan 8, it seems less likely for (. Greek phis, in which the shaft stays within the circle, occur in the Phoenicianized central Aegean; the southern region did not use the letter at all. In alphabets that on other grounds appear to be ancient, the shaft projects clearly in both directions. In the Near East, there is no example of a South Semitic w in which the division goes beyond the circle. Indeed this would go against what seems to be its basic form, that of a double O.

Graphically, (F is identical to the qop universal in South Semitic seen in the Ethiopic q and Sabaean Q. Qop is always associated with back vowels, hence the Greek koppa-presumably a secondary borrowing. In Roman, Q, derived from a later 9-like qop, was used to represent the Indo-

European labiovelar kw. Could this not have been the case in Greek? We know from Semitic that if ( was transmitted, it must have been before the 14th century, because after that the shaft dropped below the top of the circle. Thus it is reasonable to postulate that the letter was introduced before the breakdown of the Greek labiovelars, which evidence from linear B suggests took place around the middle of the second millennium (Chadwick 1973a: 81-82; 1975: 808-11). In most contexts kw was simply develarized to become p. Thus ( would have become a spare labial altogether appropriate for ph, a sound lacking in Semitic.

X. There are two possible origins for the western or "red" khi: T: the derivative from kap suggested by Naveh (1982: 184) and Praetorius' proposal (1902: 677) that it came from the South Semitic h seen in the Sabaean t and the Ethiopic vh. Graphically, the match between fh and the Greek letter is perfect. There is however the phonetic problem that the Semitic het was clearly distinguished from ha until the second half of the second millennium. On the other hand, the fit k, kh, required by Naveh is not perfect either, and it is appropriate to remain skeptical.

The origin of the Greek "blue" khi, X, also found in Carian, Lycian, and Messapic, is clearer. Praetorius (1902: 678), Evans (1909: 94) and Dussaud (1907: 73-74) all saw a similarity between this khi and the Thamudic and Safaitic X, ha. Presumably because of the frequent loans and transcriptions of h as khi, they were not perturbed that khi is generally supposed not to have been spirantized in early times. Thus both the graphic and the phonetic correspondences between the Greek X and the archaic South Semitic X ha are excellent.

T. This letter appears in two forms, "single" in "blue" alphabets and "double" (with two pairs of branches in opposite directions) in the few "red" dialects that contain it. The reason for the distinction is clearly that the "single" form could not be used where the "niche" was occupied by the "red" khi. It is, however, difficult to tell which was the original form. Both have Thamudic

equivalents but other evidence5 suggests that the "double" psi was primary but with a propensity to

simplify where possible. To help clarify this, it will be useful to consider

first what sound or sounds the letter psi represented in Greek. Few if any words with Indo- European roots begin with ps. More Greek words with this initial seem to derive from the common

14 BASOR 267


A B E I K on

I I I I

1700

1600

9 cXpQ

1500

1400

1300

1200

1100

1000

900

Fig. 10. Selected Greek letters.

Late Egyptian pattern of masculine definite article p', followed by the sibilant. Others cannot; and these appear to come from the Canaanite s. More stems seem to come from the Canaanite z. These include pseud- from zwd, "pretentious or false," and psor- from zwr, "scabby, loathsome." The suggestion that v was used for "unclear" sibilants is strengthened by the confusion within Greek between such words as pseros and xeros, "dry," and ps5mos and zomos, "delicacy."

To return to the letter form; W. It is attested in Hungarian as zs in Siberian as c2 or g2 and in Phrygian as a sibilant. "Double" psis appear in Tifineh as z and in Runes as -z or -r. The last has been derived from Italian forms of the same type, which have also been identified in Lemnian. Pre- sumably, the Glagolitic and Cyrillic zhivete, jC zh was taken from Runes or East European alphabet (Taylor 1883: 2.201). None of these alphabets had a Greek psi. Thus one can suppose that these letters and psi were relics of a widely known extra sibilant, probably voiced. In Greece, because of its redundancy the psi was used to represent the common p' + s from Egyptian.

Praetorius (1902: 678-79) plausibly saw the origin of psi in the Safaitic dal. In both this alphabet and Thamudic it was written "single" or "double" or "single with a check." However, in none of the Canaanite loans z >ps is the former an etymological dal. This provides two important

clues about the alphabet of primary transmission: first, it indicates that this alphabet came from Phoenicia, not from the Syrian coast further north where d merged with d not z. Second, the transmission seems to have taken place not long after the latter merger early in the second millennium (Harris 1939: 36). Thus the most plausible date for the transmission would seem to be the second quarter of the second millennium.

f. This letter has now been attested in the Samian abecedary of ca. 660, and thus seems to be as old as any other letter. It has several variants in Greece; appearing as a circle containing a dot or smaller circle (L. H. Jeffery, personal communication, Spring 1978) or as in northwest Ana- tolia and Etruria and possibly the Achaean city of Phleious as an 8 (Jeffery 1961: 147, n. 1). In some Italian scripts and in Runic the "struts" are turned down (Haas 1965: 224). Jeffery (1961: 37-38) argues that omega is an opened circle and that the "struts" are secondary. However, the examples indicate that the "struts" are relics of a second circle. It is only on the assumption that the letter was originally two circles that one can explain the cursive co.

The common South Semitic waw was a circle or ellipse divided by a line e. In Thamudic, there was a variant with two concentric circles and in South Arabic and early Ethiopic there are forms of a horizontal oo or C. The shape of the Ugaritic 'olu

1987 15

MARTIN BERNAL

JI tallies well with these. Thus it is probable that the creators of its linear prototype used an archaic w to represent the consonant's vocalic reflex 'o/u. This would explain the derivation of omega.

With Q we complete the scheme for a Semitic origin for all the Greek vowels except for eta and the "new letters." Figure 10 sets out the correspondences between the coastal Levantine letter forms and the early Greek ones. The solid lines suppose a Byblian transmission and the broken ones suppose a transmission from hypothetical conservative dialects in Phoenicia, although not in Syria and Palestine.

To summarize, dating for the letters discussed is as follows:

B, D, X, T, Q: before 1400 B.C.

A, E, I, O, n-, E: before 1300 B.C.

K, M: after 1000 B.C.

The other letters provide insufficient evidence on which to determine dating.

From this and the principle that a script is as old as its oldest letter, it is evident that the alphabet must have been transmitted before 1400 B.C. On the other hand, the late K and M are not the only indications that there was a major reorganization in the first quarter of the first millennium. The alphabetic and numerical orders are clearly based on the Canaanite and Phoenician ones and the o's in iota and rh6 indicate that Greek letter names are Canaanite or Phoenician rather than early west Semitic-or for that matter, Aramaic.

CONCLUSIONS

The discussion makes it clear that far from being the earliest-as is commonly supposed-the south Aegean alphabets of Crete and Thera are

NO

'This was discovered after the publication of Jeffery, 1961. Jeffery, does, however, illustrate it in 1982: 825.

2I have completed studies of the other letters in Cadmean Letters: The Westward Diffusion of the

the most recent, precisely because they are the closest to Phoenician. Ionia and Aeolis were the regions least affected by Phoenicians and Dorians in the Early Iron Age. The Ionians took great pride in preserving their Bronze Age traditions. Thus once one concedes that the alphabet was introduced in the second millennium, it becomes obvious that the Ionians would have been the people most likely to have retained the earlier forms.

There are other indications that the Ionian alphabet was the most ancient in Greece. It was the alphabet of the Homeric epics and it was adopted as the pan-Hellenic alphabet at the beginning of the fourth century. It is usual for scripts to spread with economic, political or mili- tary power. But by no stretch of the imagination can the Ionians be said to have triumphed in the Persian and Peloponnesian wars. The reasons for their alphabet's success were clearly cultural. Not only was it that of Homer but it was seen as the most ancient form, and this was considered reason to establish it as the standard form. This view is confirmed by the passage from Herodotus quoted at the beginning of this article, in which he de- scribes the "Cadmean letters" as being "most of them not very different from the Ionian" (1:58).

If Herodotus were being tricked, the forgers believed that the Ionian was the most ancient alphabet. It would seem more probable, however, that the inscriptions were genuine and that they were examples of 14th century inscriptions with vowels and "new letters."

To conclude, it would seem that if we use all the information at our disposal, in a relatively logical and detached way, we will arrive at very much the same conclusion as Herodotus and his

contemporaries: that the Phoenician or Levantine

alphabet was transmitted westward around the middle of the second millennium B.C.

TES

Semitic Alphabet before 1400 B.C., forthcoming. 3This is argued at more length in Cadmean Letters. 4See Cadmean Letters. 5See Cadmean Letters.

16 BASOR 267


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Bass, G. 1967

Bernal, M

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1986 Black Athena Denied: The Tyranny of Ger- many over Greece and the Rejection of the Afroasiatic roots of Greece 1780-1980. Com- parative Criticism 8: 3-69.

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