Greek Writing from Knossos to Homer

Download or read book Greek Writing from Knossos to Homer written by Roger D. Woodard and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1997 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Certain characteristic features of the Cypriot script - for example, its strategy for representing consonant sequences and elements of Cypriot Greek phonology - were transferred to the new alphabetic script. Proposing a Cypriot origin of the alphabet at the hands of previously literate adapters brings clarity to various problems of the alphabet, such as the Greek use of the Phoenician sibilant letters. The alphabet, rejected by the post-Bronze Age "Mycenaean" 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. Woodard's study, a combination of philological and epigraphical investigation with linguistic theory, should be of interest to both scholars and students of classics, linguistics, and Near Eastern studies.