The history of the Greek alphabet starts with the adoption of Phoenician letter forms in the 9th–8th centuries BC during early Archaic Greece and continues to the present day. The Greek alphabet was developed during the Iron Age, centuries after the loss of Linear B, the syllabic script that was used for writing Mycenaean Greek until the Late Bronze Age collapse and Greek Dark Age. This article concentrates on the development of the alphabet before the modern codification of the standard Greek alphabet.
The Phoenician alphabet was consistently explicit only about consonants, though even by the 9th century BC it had developed matres lectionis to indicate some, mostly final, vowels. This arrangement is much less suitable for Greek than for Semitic languages, and these matres lectionis, as well as several Phoenician letters which represented consonants not present in Greek, were adapted according to the acrophonic principle to represent Greek vowels consistently, if not unambiguously.
The Greek alphabet was developed by a Greek with first-hand experience of contemporary Phoenician script. After it was established in the Greek mainland, it was exported eastwards to Phrygia, where a similar script was devised. It was also exported westwards with Euboean or West Greek traders, where the Etruscans adapted the Greek alphabet to their own language, which eventually led to the Latin alphabet.
Chronology of adoption
Most specialists believe that the Phoenician alphabet was adopted for Greek during the early 8th century BC, perhaps in Euboea. The earliest known fragmentary Greek inscriptions date from this time, 770–750 BC, and they match Phoenician letter forms of c. 800–750 BC. The oldest substantial texts known to date are the Dipylon inscription and the text on the so-called Cup of Nestor, both dated to the late 8th century BC, inscriptions of personal ownership and dedications to a god. Tradition recounts that a daughter of a certain Agamemnon, king of Aeolian Cyme, married a Phrygian king called Midas. This link may have facilitated the Greeks "borrowing" their alphabet from the Phrygians because the Phrygian letter shapes are closest to the inscriptions from Aeolis. Some scholars argue for earlier dates: Naveh (1973) for the 11th century BC, Stieglitz (1981) for the 14th century, Bernal (1990) for the 18th–13th century, some for the 9th, but none of these are widely accepted.
The Fayum alphabet, originating on Cyprus, seems to be older than the fragmentary Greek inscriptions: it is dated to c. 800 BC and appears to preserve the earliest known form of the Greek alphabet. This could indicate that the Phoenician alphabet was adapted to Greek on Cyprus, where an important Phoenician colony existed at the time in the city-kingdom of Kition; however, the Cypriot syllabary, which was already employed at the time to write the local dialect, having been in use since the 11th century, remained in use in Cyprus until the 4th century BC and was not replaced by the adapted Phoenician alphabet this early.
Another possibility is that the adaptation happened on Thera, which Herodotus and Pausanias claim to have been settled early by Phoenicians descending from Cadmus; however, a Phoenician presence on the island has not been proven archaeologically.
Herodotus' account
According to legends recounted by Herodotus, the alphabet was first introduced to Greece by a Phoenician named Cadmus:
Herodotus estimates that Cadmus lived sixteen hundred years earlier, or around 2000 BC. He had seen and described the Cadmean writing engraved on certain tripods in the temple of Apollo at Thebes. He estimated that those tripods dated back to the time of Laius, the great-grandson of Cadmus. On one of the tripods there was this inscription in Cadmean writing, which as he attested, resembled Ionian letters: ("Amphitryon dedicated me from the spoils of [the battle of] Teleboae."). A second tripod bears the inscription in hexameter verse: . ("Scaeus the boxer, victorious in the contest, dedicated me to Apollo, the archer god, a lovely offering"). Herodotus estimated that if Scaeus, the son of Hippocoon was the dedicator and not another of the same name, he would have lived at the time of Oedipus. The third tripod bears the inscription again in hexameter verse: . ("Laodamas, while he reigned, dedicated this cauldron to Apollo, the sure of aim, as a lovely offering").
Hyginus' account
Hyginus recounts the following legends about the development of the alphabet: