Greek Writing from Knossos to Homer: A Linguistic Interpretation of the Origin of the Greek Alphabet and the Continuity of Ancient Greek Literacy Book

In this book, Woodard examines the origin of the Greek alphabet. Deviating from previous accounts, he places the advent of the alphabet at a point within an unbroken continuum of Greek literacy beginning in the Mycenean era. Woodard argues that the creators of the Greek alphabet, or, more accurately the adapters of the Phoenician consonantal script, were scribes accustomed to writing Greek with the syllabic script of Cyprus. Certain characteristic features of Cypriot script, gestures which arose from the idiosyncratic Cypriot strategy for representing consonant sequence and from the intersection of this strategy with elements of Cypriot Greek phonology, were transferred to the new alphabetic script. Proposing this Cypriot origin to the alphabet at the hands of previously literate adapters clears up various problems of the alphabet, such as the Greek use of the Phoenician sibilant letters. The alphabet, though rejected by the post-Bronze Age "Mycenaen" culture of Cyprus, was exported west to the Aegean, where it gained a foothold among a then illiterate Greek people emerging from the Dark Age.