Academic literature on the topic 'Archaic Greek alphabets'

We investigated the time evolution of the symmetry of symbols constituting alphabets rooted in the Phoenician script. A diversity of quantitative measures of symmetry of graphemes appearing in Phoenician, Western Greek, Etruscan from Marsiliana, Archaic Etruscan, Neo-Etruscan, Euclidian Greek, Archaic and Classical Latin and Proto-Hebrew scripts, constituting the Phoenician script family, were calculated. The same measures were established for the Hebrew/Ashurit and English scripts. The Shannon-like measures of symmetry were computed. The Shannon diversity index was calculated. Our findings indicate that the Shannon diversity index increased with time in a monotonic way for the studied scripts. The diversity of symmetry groups inherent for addressed alphabets grows with time. We also introduced the symmetry factor of the alphabet. The symmetry factor quantifies the averaged level of symmetrization of the alphabet and the possible parsimony of graphical information necessary for the drawing of the entire set of graphemes constituting the alphabet. We found that the symmetry factor is decreased with time for the alphabets rooted in the Phoenician script. This means that the average level of symmetrization of the studied alphabet increases with time. The parsimony of graphical information necessary for writing graphemes is consequently increased with time. The values of the symmetry factor calculated for the addressed scripts are close to one another, with the pronounced exception of the Hebrew/Ashurit script. Our study supplies the arguments for the point of view, according to which the modern Hebrew/Ashurit script did not emerge from the Phoenician one.

The emergence of local alphabets in archaic Greece, different from one another in the shapes of only few letters, is usually seen as accidental. Observing the use of local alphabets outside their area of origin especially, this article argues that they were consciously created so as to be recognizable from one another and closely associated with perceived ethnic boundaries within the Greek world. The use of the local alphabets should be observed in conjunction with the use of dialects, which appear to have functioned in a similar way.

In recent years much emphasis has been placed upon the effects of literacy in the transformation of the Mediterranean World between 800 and 400 BC. Alphabetic scripts have been seen by many, archaeologists and classicists alike, as one of the key factors that made many of the achievements of Mediterranean, particularly Greek, thought and culture possible. Alphabetic scripts encouraged widespread literacy, and widespread literacy was the necessary condition for what remains distinctive in Ancient Greek culture, namely the development of History, Philosophy and speculative Natural Science. Murray (1980: 96) is typical in his view that ‘Archaic Greece was a literate society in the modern sense.’ The work of Goody & Watt (1963) has done much to advance the view that many of the achievements of Mediterranean Society can be ascribed to, if not entirely explained by, this ‘technology of the intellect’. Their ‘autonomous model’ however, as Cartledge (1978: 37) has observed, comes dangerously close to technological determinism.

The Aegean and Mediterranean world between 1000 and 600 BCE (the Early Iron Age and the earliest part of the Archaic period) continues to attract considerable scholarly attention. And for good reason. The period between 1000 and 600 BCE is the formative period in Greek history, where those institutions we most firmly associate with Greek culture (the sanctuary, the polis, the alphabet and the literature that resulted from it) took their definitive form. It is also a period where investigation has to be undertaken primarily by archaeologists.

Abstract This paper revisits the etymology of Greek ἐπίκουρος, which for over a century has been analyzed as a compound of ἐπί and an otherwise non-extant verbal root *κορσο-, from an Indo-European root familiar in Latin currō ‘run’. After reviewing the linguistic, epigraphic, and philological evidence, I conclude that this etymology is untenable. From here I turn to the Linear B data and demonstrate that the e-pi-ko-wo of the Pylian o-ka texts (ca. 1200 B.C.) should be interpreted as /epikor woi/; this presents us with the linguistic antecedent of ἐπί- κουρος, which should be etymologized as a prepositional Rektionskompositum, where ἐπί governs κόρϝος (‘he who is in close proximity to the κόρϝος (warrior)’ / ‘he who is attached to/accompanying the warriors’). Early in the Archaic period, this older Mycenaean term was replaced by a new coinage - σύμμαχος - which more appropriately described a military relationship binding one Greek polis to another. These conclusions are supported by early epic usage, historical linguistic analysis, and a full study of the Linear B texts in question. This new etymology has stimulating archaeological correlates and exemplifies the importance and broad applications of the Linear B texts for the reconstruction of Greek prehistory and society and our understanding of the epic tradition

Abstract For more than a millennium there have been reports testifying to the presence of Goths in the Crimea. However, until a few years ago, the only evidence of a Gothic or Germanic idiom spoken in the peninsula stems from the list of words recorded between 1560 and 1562 by Ogier de Busbecq. Significant new evidence, however, has become available through the recent discovery of five Gothic graffiti scratched on two reused fragments of a cornice belonging to the early Byzantine basilica at Mangup-Qale in the Crimea. The graffiti, datable to between about 850 and the end of the 10th century, exhibit words in Gothic known from Wulfila’s Bible translation, the script used being an archaic variant of Wulfila’s alphabet and the only specimen of this alphabet attested outside Pannonia and Italy. There would seem to be evidence for assuming that, among educated Crimean Goths, Gothic served as a spoken vernacular in a triglossic situation along with a purely literary type of Gothic and with Greek in the second half of the 9th century.

Abstract:T. Dorandi, who has previously proposed to read the book number included in the end-title of P.Herc. 1669 (Philodemus’ On Rhetoric) as a numerical ϝ-shaped digamma (= 6), has now advanced the same reading in the subscriptio of P.Oxy. 1176 (Satyrus, Lives book 6), where the editor princeps and all subsequent editors had unanimously read a stigma before. In this article, I argue not only that both readings are palaeographically untenable, but also that they historically contradict the graphic and functional evolution of digamma within the Greek alphabet. In particular, in both Graeco-Egyptian and Herculaneum papyri, ϝ-shaped digamma is always attested as a merely phonetic element (/w/ or waw) – never as a numeral symbol – whereas stigma, which represents the historical evolution of a variant of Archaic and Classical digamma, is the only form used as a numerical sign (= 6).

This article extends recent work on the political implications of Julia Kristeva’s work, notably Cecilia Sjöholm’s Kristeva and the Political, through a reading of Janet Frame’s last novel, The Carpathians. My intention is twofold: to ground Sjöholm’s analysis of Kristeva in a concrete cultural example, and to redetermine Frame’s significance as a postcolonial writer implicated in the potentialities of politics and social change. Rather than granting automatic political and social importance to abjection, Sjöholm and Frame signal a fresh perspective on the very relationship of the abject to politics, which points towards a notion of politics disimplicated from standard assumptions about its operations. For my purposes here, I am defining abjection (following Kristeva) as that concern with borderline states that subtends the psychic mechanisms by which the subject establishes itself in relationship to others. Abjection references, more specifically, an original failure of separation from the pre-Oedipal space of the mother, although this archaic situation is subsequently transposed, as Kristeva argues at length in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, into various dramas of dietary regulation, bodily disgust, ‘shady’ behaviour, and the like. “It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (Kristeva 4). Abjection is the simultaneously horrified and ecstatic discovery by the subject that what lies without also lies within, that to be one is also to be an other. Not that one necessarily lives on the edge, but that the edge is what makes us live. Kristeva also calls the abject and abjection “the primers of my culture,” and this is as good a point as any from which to commence an investigation into the cultural and political effects of her notions of subject formation (Kristeva 2). The word ‘primer’ is semantically rich, suggesting as it does ‘an introduction’, a ‘preparation’, or ‘the quality of being first.’ But which is it for Kristeva? And more to the point, do any of these various meanings rise to the challenge of describing a powerful connection between abjection and the ‘community of subjects’ that constitutes the privileged arena of political activity? This has been a key issue in Kristevan studies at least as far back as 1985, when Toril Moi voiced her concerns that Kristeva is unable to account for the relations between the subject and society. ... She seems essentially to argue that the disruption of the subject … prefigures or parallels revolutionary disruptions of society. But her only argument in support of this contention is the rather lame one of comparison or homology. Nowhere are we given a specific analysis of the actual social or political structures that would produce such a homologous relationship between the subjective and the social (Moi 171). Sjöholm enters at this juncture, with a new take on the question of Kristeva’s political effectiveness, which results, as I shall demonstrate, in a sharper perspective on what it might mean for abjection to be considered as a ‘cultural primer’. In a move that comprehensively outflanks the critique disseminated by Moi and others, which is that Kristeva’s theory stalls at the level of the individual subject or discrete work of art, Sjöholm argues that Rather than promoting an apolitical and naïve belief in artistic revolt, which she has often been accused of, [Kristeva’s] theorisation of the semiotic, of the pre-Oedipal, of the intimate, etc. draws the consequences of a sustained displacement of the political from the universal towards the singular: art and psychoanalysis (Sjöholm 126). Sjöholm makes the case for a reconfiguration of the concept of politics itself, such that the violences that Universalist ideals inflict on marginal political actors are evaded through recourse to the fresh notion of a ‘singular politics’. Sjöholm shifts the scene of the political wholesale. Although Spinoza is not mentioned by name in Kristeva & the Political, the influence of his endlessly provocative question ‘What can a body do?’ can be felt between the lines of Sjöholm’s argument (Spinoza Part III, Proposition II, Note). The body is, in this way of thinking, a primer of culture in the strong sense of a continual provocation to culture, one that pushes out the boundaries of what is possible—politically possible—in the cultural realm. Janet Wilson’s paper ‘The Abject and the Sublime: Enabling Conditions of New Zealand’s Postcolonial Identity’ skips over the problem of how, precisely, a Kristevan politics might bridge the gap between textual and/or individualistic concerns and New Zealand society. Wilson’s analysis seems to default to a version of the argument from “comparison or homology” that Moi takes to task (Moi 171). For example, Wilson claims that “the nation, New Zealand, can be imaged as the emergent subject” (Wilson 304) and even that “New Zealand’s colonisation, like that of Australia and Canada and perhaps Singapore, can be described in terms of parent-child relations” (Wilson 300). One of the texts considered from within this framework is Janet Frame’s The Carpathians. Wilson is constrained, however, by her notion of the political as necessarily operational at the macro level of the nation and society, and she thereby overlooks the aspect of Frame’s novel that adheres to Sjöholm’s analysis of the ‘micro’ or ‘singular’ politics that circulates on a subterranean stratum throughout Kristeva’s philosophy. The Carpathians is a complex text that links New Zealand’s postcolonial concerns to discourses of myth and science fiction, and to an interrogation of the impossibility of defending any single position of narrative or cultural authority. At the simplest level, it tells the story of Mattina Brecon, an American, who travels to small-town New Zealand and finds herself caught up in a catastrophe of identity and cultural disintegration. The point I want to make here by leaving out much in the way of the actual plot of the novel is that, while it is possible to isolate aspects of a community politics in this novel (for example, in Frame’s portrait of a marae or traditional Maori gathering place), the political impulse of The Carpathians is actually more powerfully directed towards the sort of politics championed by Sjöholm. It takes place ‘beneath’ the plot. In Frame, we witness a ‘miniaturization’ or ‘singularization’ of politics, as when Mattina finds that her own body is abjectly ripe with language: She noticed a small cluster like a healed sore on the back of her left hand. She picked at it. The scab crumbled between her fingers and fell on the table into a heap the size of a twenty-cent coin. Examining it, she discovered it to be a pile of minute letters of the alphabet, some forming minute words, some as punctuation marks; and not all were English letters—there were Arabic, Russian, Chinese and Greek symbols. There must have been over a hundred in that small space, each smaller than a speck of dust yet strangely visible as if mountain-high, in many colours and no colours, sparkling, without fire (Frame 129). In this passage, the body is under no obligation to ‘lift itself up’ to the level of politics conceived in social or large-scale terms. Rather, politics as a community formation of language and nationalities has taken up residence within the body, or more precisely at its abject border, in the form of that which both is and is not of the body: an everyday sore or scab. Abjection operates here as a ‘cultural primer’ to the extent that it pulverizes established notions of, most evidently, the politics of language (English and Maori) in postcolonial New Zealand. Later in the same paragraph from The Carpathians quoted from just now, Frame writes that “The people of Kowhai Street had experienced the disaster of unbeing, unknowing. . . . They were alive, yet on the other side of the barrier of knowing and being” (Frame 129). In this passage, we encounter the challenge promoted equally by Frame’s and (via Sjöholm) Kristeva’s unconventional politics of identity dissolution and reconstitution on a plane of singularity. Sjöholm’s analysis of Kristeva provides a framework for interpreting Frame’s fiction from a perspective that does justice to her particular literary concerns, while The Carpathians offers up an engaging example of the until-now hidden potential carried within Kristeva’s conceptualisation of politics, as drawn out by Sjöholm. References Frame, Janet. The Carpathians. London: Pandora, 1989. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia UP, 1982. Moi, Toril. Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. London: Routledge, 1985. Sjöholm, Cecilia. Kristeva & the Political. London: Routledge, 2005. Spinoza. Ethics. London: Dent, 1993 (1677). Wilson, Janet. “The Abject and Sublime: Enabling Conditions of New Zealand’s Postcolonial Identity.” Postcolonial Cultures and Literatures. Eds. Andrew Benjamin, Tony Davies, and Robbie B. H. Goh. New York: Peter Lang, 2002. Citation reference for this article MLA Style West, Patrick. "Abjection as ‘Singular Politics’ in Janet Frame’s The Carpathians." M/C Journal 9.5 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0610/05-west.php>. APA Style West, P. (Nov. 2006) "Abjection as ‘Singular Politics’ in Janet Frame’s The Carpathians," M/C Journal, 9(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0610/05-west.php>.

Regional variation, a persistent feature of Greek alphabetic writing throughout the Archaic period, has been studied since at least the late nineteenth century. The subject was transformed by the publication in 1961 of Lilian H. (Anne) Jeffery's Local Scripts of Archaic Greece (reissued with a valuable supplement by A. Johnston in 1990), based on first-hand study of more than a thousand inscriptions. Much important new evidence has emerged since 1987 (Johnston's cut-off date), and debate has continued energetically about all the central issues raised by the book: the date at which the Phoenician script was taken over and filled out with vowels; the priority of Phrygia or Greece in that takeover; whether the takeover happened once, and the resulting alphabet then spread outwards, or whether takeover occurred independently in several paces; if the takeover was a single event, the region where it occurred; if so again, the explanation for the many divergences in local script. The hypothesis that the different scripts emerged not through misunderstandings but through conscious variation has been strongly supported, and contested, in the post-Jeffery era; also largely post-Jeffery is the flourishing debate about the development and functions of literacy in Archaic Greece. Dialectology, the understanding of vocalization, and the study of ancient writing systems more broadly have also moved forwards rapidly. In this volume a team of scholars combining the various relevant expertises (epigraphic, philological, historical, archaeological) provide the first comprehensive overview of the state of the question 70 years after Jeffery's masterpiece.

This paper poses the question of what graphic diversity – i.e. variation in the features of writing systems – has to do with linguistic diversity and contact. The differing features of the Archaic regional Greek alphabets, for example, have overwhelmingly been studied in terms of palaeographical variation, and attempts to reconstruct the relationships between them have focused mainly on sign repertoire and sign shapes. We may assume that the dialectal diversity of Archaic Greece would map onto this picture of graphic diversity, and perhaps to some extent motivate it, but the distribution of features tells quite a different story. A further question revolves around the ways in which different writing systems may interact with each other: what is involved in such “graphic contact”? Can we think of it as operating in similar ways to language contact or not?

Many Archaic inscriptions have been found since the revision of L. H. Jeffery's Local Scripts in 1990. This chapter presents a selection of some 50 new Attic Archaic inscriptions and some 25 from the Attic-Ionic islands and the Doric islands of the Cyclades. The implications of the new finds for our knowledge of scripts, dialects, vocabulary, topography, and religion are drawn out. The remarkable early evidence for extensive literacy among shepherds and goatherds in Archaic Attica, and the early dedications in both Attic and Boeotian dialect and script from the sanctuary of Zeus on Mt Parnes, are particular highlights.

This chapter concentrates on the important collections of early graffiti and non-alphabetic marks recently published from Methone and Eretria, and dating to the late eighth and early seventh centuries. It picks up Jeffery's emphasis on the materiality of writing, examining their placing on the whole pot or sherd, and it asks what these new graffiti contribute to our views about the spread of the early alphabet. It makes particular use of the graffiti which are not alphabetic, but which seem from placing and appearance to be engaged in a similar form of marking and communication to the obviously alphabetic marks. It argues that these early graffiti do not show the alphabet as necessarily trying to recreate sound or speech, but do show why there was such an impetus to take over the alphabet. In Methone and Eretria we see the 'seed bed' for the rapid spread of the alphabet.

This chapter stresses the importance of the series of letters people actually learnt and taught in the different 'local scripts', together with the series of letter names they learnt by heart. The physical manifestation of this tradition is in abecedaria. The differences between these local alphabets can be explained by three types of reform that took place while the alphabet spread, viz. the adding, reinterpreting, or abolishing of letters. Attention to chronology allows quite precise 'predictions' about the otherwise hidden first years of the alphabet in Greece. Some common views will therefore have to be given up, for instance that the three islands, Thera, Melos, and Crete, which use a particularly archaic type of alphabet, are therefore plausible candidates for particularly early writing. The takeover of the alphabet was a single event, but we will very likely never be able to specify either where or when precisely it took place.

This chapter provides a survey of the legends that appear on coins throughout the Mediterranean world before c.480 BC. It analyses them by purpose, geographical origin, and type, and compares their distribution to the overall patterns of production and circulation during the same period. It concludes (1) that after an early period of use for personal names, the overwhelming nature of the coin legend by the end of the Archaic period is to identify communities; and (2) that the Western Greek world of Italy and Sicily has a propensity for the use of such communal identifiers, and abbreviations thereof, somewhat greater than is found elsewhere in the Greek world. An appendix summarizes those coin legends discussed in Jeffery's Local Scripts and gathers legends not discussed. As far as possible all legends are illustrated.

Archaic Crete has always provided a useful counterweight to Athenocentric views of how early Greece developed. This paper's focus is on Crete's epigraphic habits. It proposes that there is a deep-seated connexion between these and other features of its material culture-its austerity, and apparent lack of interest in narrative art. It goes on to compare epigraphic habits in Western, Central, and Eastern Crete. It concentrates on inscriptions from the three known Archaic political communities in Eastern Crete: Azoria, Praisos, and Itanos. They differ as much from each other as they do from the pattern to be found in Central Crete. Insofar as there is an East Cretan pattern, however, it seems in part to relate to a greater interest in figurative art than was the case in Central Crete. Whether this relates to linguistic differences, which seemed to have required modifications to the Cretan epichoric script, is also discussed.

This chapter provides a critical presentation of the most important Boeotian inscriptions in epichoric script published since the revision of Local Scripts in 1990. It allows us to follow the development of Boeotian epigraphy from the Archaic period well into the early fourth century BC. Several new inscriptions supplement information derived from the literary sources; one in particular spectacularly vindicates the good faith of Herodotus. Archaeologically, such texts have allowed the identification of major ancient sites. Epigraphically, they display a remarkable uniformity that allows us to talk of a Boeotian koine. Historically, they challenge established ideas of limited literacy. Recent finds also unequivocally demonstrate that the Boeotian script was still being used well into the fourth century and approximately down to the period of the so-called Theban hegemony. An appendix provides the editio princeps of a funerary epigram inscribed in epichoric script.

As a contribution to further study of the remarkable 'New Festival Calendar from Arkadia' jointly published in Kernos 2016 by James Clackson and Jan-Mathieu Carbon, this chapter proposes a comparative analysis of the letter forms on this bronze and on the most ancient Arcadian inscriptions already known, in accordance with the method developed by Jeffery in Local Scripts of Archaic Greece. The aim is to clarify the dating of the new inscription. The study of a set of specific spellings (in particular for [ts]) allows their geographical distribution to be highlighted. Confrontation with other dialectal specificities then allows the origin of the inscription to be established more clearly, as well as the conditions of writing what may be seen as rules regulating animal sacrifices and the calendar of local religious festivals. A note discusses the interpretation of Κορυνίτιον‎, LL. 3, 7.

Abstract The local (or epichoric) alphabets were in use until the V cent., when they were gradually usurped by the Ionic alphabet. Each had its idiosyncrasies, both in the use of the letters and in the letter shapes: this may be partly due to accidents of transmission and selection, and partly to a conscious desire on the part of each polisto have a distinctive script2. The Ionians, whose dialects were psilotic (§23.10), reused the aspirate sign for long e (eta): then they created a sign for the corresponding long o by opening up o to make Ω. Neither F nor Î’ was used: F because the sound [w] disappeared early in Ionic, and Î’ because it was functionally irrelevant (the difference between front and back velars in Greek is not phonemic). Ionia standardized the alphabet (and an ‘official’ epigraphic dialect) at an early stage, and to this extent was atypical. The Ionic alphabet seems to have enjoyed great prestige in the Greek world, perhaps because of its association with the archaic literature and culture of the region (including epic and scientific prose). Most high literature in Athens seems to have been written in the Ionic alphabet in the V cent., and an increasing number of private inscriptions3. Official inscriptions (paid for by the state) continued to be written in the Attic alphabet until the official adoption of Ionic script in 403/2.