The Transmission of the Phoenician Script to the West

It is widely believed that Phoenician trade routes transmitted the Phoenician script to the Greeks, who transformed it into a fully alphabetic script. Evidence of this comes from the shapes, names and ordering of the letters, and evidence in ancient Greek inscriptions that they themselves referred to their writing as ‘Phoenician characters’. The date of this transmission is controversial; estimates range from 1500-700 BC. However, what is generally agreed upon is that it must have been a result of a prolonged relationship between the two civilizations, rather than sporadic contact, and that it must have taken place at a time when the political, economic and educational environment necessitated a notation system for Greek.

The Greek alphabet was not unified in the early stages of transmission; there were six geographically divided variant forms. Although these display some differences in the shapes of letters, they all have in common the representation of vowels, which is not found in Phoenician writing. It is thought that this was partly a Greek innovation, and partly influenced by the existence of the Cypriot syllabary which was also in use at the time. The Greeks also wrote fairly consistently from left to right, although Phoenician was written from right to left.

By 402 BC, the Ionic form of Greek writing had been established as a standard; this is the form from which the modern Greek alphabet is derived.

This article formerly appeared on ScriptSource.