Homer and the Origin of the Greek Alphabet
Homer and the Origin of the Greek Alphabet
£39.99
GBPWho invented the Greek alphabet and why? The purpose of this challenging book is to inquire systematically into the historical causes that underlay the radical shift from earlier and less efficient writing systems to the use of alphabetic writing. The author reaches the conclusion that a single man, perhaps from the island of Euboea, invented the Greek alphabet specifically in order to record the Iliad and the Odyssey of Homer.
- Hardback has been very widely reviewed in UK and USA
- Hardback has sold over 900 copies at a high price
- Outstanding presentation of all the relevant evidence
Reviews & endorsements
' … this is a book which is as remarkable for the ingenuity of its answers to difficult questions as it is for its useful review and compelling display of so much of the relevant evidence.' Bryn Mawr Classical Review
'[This] is an important book, and will be widely read by students of writing in other cultures as well as by Homerists, linguists, historians and archaeologists of early Greece.' Classical Philology
Product details
December 1996Paperback
9780521589079
308 pages
353 × 98 × 20 mm
0.46kg
4 maps 6 tables
Available
Table of Contents
- Foreword: why was the Greek alphabet invented? 1. Review of criticism: what we know about the origin of the Greek alphabet
- 2. Argument from the history of writing: how writing worked before the Greek alphabet
- 3. Argument from the material remains: Greek inscriptions from the beginning to c. 650 BC
- 4. Argument from coincidence: dating Greece's earliest poet
- 5. Conclusions from probability: how the Iliad and the Odyssey were written down
- Appendix I: Gelb's theory of the syllabic nature of West Semitic writing
- Appendix II: Homeric references in poets of the seventh century.
