Visible writing: questions of script and identity in Early Iron Age Greece and Cyprus

Abstract

Summary. A number of seemingly intractable problems still surround the introduction of the Greek alphabet some time around the middle of the eighth century BC, after more than four centuries of Greek illiteracy. The question of when this happened, though debated, seems still more or less a matter of consensus on the basis of the date of the earliest extant Greek alphabetic inscriptions, but the questions of where, how and why it did remain largely unresolved. Of these problems, perhaps one of the most intractable is that of why it happened when it did, given that the old idea of an isolated ‘Dark Age’ Greece, cut off from the literate east during the centuries before 800 BC, is no longer sustainable. On Cyprus, too, there is something of a literacy ‘gap’ between the early tenth and late eighth centuries, though there is every reason to suppose that an indigenous syllabic script continued in use on the island over this period, and the problem therefore is one of visibility rather than existence. This paper considers the contexts in which alphabetic literacy was introduced to Greece and in which syllabic literacy became visible once more on Cyprus at around the same time, in order to see if these are entirely coincidental or whether some link may be found between them. In particular, it raises some general questions concerning the relationships between script and language and between language and identity in different parts of the ancient world in the later second and early first millennia, and the implications these may have for the role of script in constructing and defining identities in eighth century Greece and Cyprus (both incidentally inhabited by Greek‐speakers). It concludes that what we see are analogous, but quite separate, developments, both of them focused on Phoenician activity, but manifesting themselves in different circumstances through parallel but different phenomena.