Re: Pearls before Swine: Medieval wonders come to Los Angeles

On Dec 13, 10:52 am, Jack Linthicum <jacklinthi...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
On Dec 13, 10:32 am, Larry Swain <gi...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:



Jack Linthicum wrote:
On Dec 12, 11:54 pm, Larry Swain <gi...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Jack Linthicum wrote:

On Dec 12, 4:48 pm, Larry Swain <gi...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Jack Linthicum wrote:

On Dec 12, 10:27 am, Larry Swain <gi...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Michael Kuettner wrote:

Nonsense. We have some surviving epigrams, but not in Greece.
The first evidence of script comes with -surprise ! - Homer.

But...and to be clear I'm not supporting Jack's position...we actually
don't have evidence of Homer being written, do we? The tradition gives
us a blind poet whose epics were recited orally until written down in
the sixth century BCE. So that leaves Hesiod, writing c. 700,
apparently with an alphabet already known to him and others, and the
earliest Olympic records, c. 776 BCE.

You have the additional problem of Cadmus bringing the alphabet from
Phoenicia to Thebes. Thebes is destroyed before the time of the Trojan
War.

And rebuilt and reinhabited. The Cadmian story has little of historical
value in it save that the Greek alphabet is obviously developed from the
NW Semitic as spread by Phonician traders/raiders.

But Cadmus founded Thebes. Therefore it was the first city in that
string.

Repeat: the Cadmian story has little of historical value in it. Let;s
take an example: if Cadmus founded Thebes some 1600 years before
Herodotus, that puts him about 2000 BCE. We have no evidence of
Phoenicians settling in Greece, or being particularly influential in
Greece and other points in the Mediterranean during this period, nor do
we have any evidence of writing in Greece, Thebes or elsewhere, other
than Linear A and B which are NOT NW Semitic alphabetic characters, and
so are not Phoenician. So we have a character founding a city who
supposedly borrowed the Phoenician alphabet at a time when the
Phoenicians weren't in the area and that we have evidence a completely
unrelated writing system without evidence of a Phoenician influenced
one. I. E. all the evidence is against the Cadmian story (and the same
problems persist if we talk about the other Cadmian myths that place him
at different times, or talk about the 16 letter alphabet).

Shorten that up to the traditional date for Cadmus ie about 1350-1300
BC,

Not according to Herodotus who estimates that Cadmus lived 1600 years
before his own time. There are other dates for Cadmus as I intimated at
the end of the post. And as I also said, even if we adjust the dates
forward, it still presents the same historical problems: we don't really
have evidence of the Phoenicians being in and about the Greek penninsula
and making significant inroads further West than Cyprus until late in
the 13th century, c. 1250-1200, comfortably after Cadmus. We further,
and quite unexpectedly if the alphabet story connected with Cadmus has
any historical truth to it, have no evidence for Greek writing using an
alphabet derived from NW Semitic until the 8th century BCE. It is
easier to explain such absence if the alphabet was adopted and adapted
in the late 10th or in the ninth century BCE and we begin to see
evidence of it in the 8th than that it was adopted in the middle 14th
century and it took 6-7 centuries to actually leave any traces,
particularly when another writing system was already leaving evidence in
Mycenaean centers--it would seem to follow then that the presence of one
writing system would give the idea of writing in another writing system
on something more durable, and the fact that nothing of the kind has
been found, suggests on the face of the available evidence that such
didn't exist until later.

Books and Readers in Ancient Greece and Rome, By Frederic G. Kenyon,
page 11
http://books.google.com/books?id=EC01XFHBQ9MC&pg=PA11&lpg=PA11&dq=cad...

This is an oldie but goodie, done in 1932.

You have to believe that the Greek Ionic alphabet sprang up sometime
in the 9th Century BC to allow for that time line. There was a proto-
Greek alphabet that later developed into several of which one, the
Ionian, was chosen in 403BC. It would take time for those various
alphabets to be created, each tuned to the local dialect.

"This confusion regarding the earliest Greek is due to the fact that
no archaeological remains of this script have been found thus far. The
earliest examples only date from the 8th century BCE, when different
scripts are already in evidence. Many scholars place the time of the
Greeks' adoption of the alphabet from the Phoenicians sometimes
between 1200 BCE and 900 BCE. The older date would give a longer time
for the proto-Greek alphabet to develop into its local forms, but
there are no archaeological remains of any writing from this period.
The later date would satisfy the lack of evidence, but gives less time
for the script to diverge. Maybe something in the middle in a good
compromise?"http://www.ancientscripts.com/alphabet.html

I came across this while looking up proto-Greek. This guy is a
published author on the origins of the Hebrew language.

In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language (Hardcover)
by Joel M. Hoffman (Author)

and this is his contribution to a similar discussion to this one a few
years back:

* From: joel@xxxxxxx (Dr. Joel M. Hoffman)
* Date: Tue, 12 Apr 2005 14:42:58 GMT


I joined this discussion late, so I hope I'm not repeating someone
else:

I go into the development of the alphabet in some detail in my latest
book (_In the Beginning:_, NYU Press, 2004); the book also includes
detailed references to other sources.

The basic story is well known: The Phoenician alphabet, which stems
from pictographs and which has a seemingly arbitrary order, became the
Hebrew alphabet, then the Aramaic alphabet, Greek alphabet, Latin
alphabet, etc. (The Hebrew and Aramaic alphabets were in fact the
same, but the letters probably had different names.) Overwhelming
evidence connects the invention of the alphabet to a Semitic language.

But there are several loose ends that suggest we have missed important
pieces of the picture.

To start, the Izbet Sartah abecedary from -1000 shows an early order
of the alphabet that differs only slightly from the canonical order of
the Hebrew alphabet. But the text is not Hebrew. (Some scholars
believe that the text is nonsense, written by a school child. I doubt
it.) If we ignore this problem, we find that while the order of the
alphabet was more or less established by -1000, the order still had
some variation.

Greek (and I know less about this) seems to be a much bigger problem.
From roughly -1450 to -750, there's essentially no Greek writing, and
then in -750, the Greek Alphabet pops into place fully formed.
Ignoring the question of why there's no Greek writing for 700 years,
we still have to wonder how exactly the Semitic alphabet --- via the
Hebrews, Arameans or Phoenicians --- became Greek so quickly, and why
there are no proto-Greek alphabets. How did the Semitic alphabet, in
which consonants but rarely doubled as vowels, so quickly become the
Greek alphabet in which separate letters were used for vowels?
Similarly, why did the Greeks feel compelled to preserve the order of
the letters, but not their sounds?

After Greek, the story becomes clearly, but the leap from Semitic to
Greek is still a partial mystery.

Theories with answers to the questions abound, but I've found none of
them convincing. Still, you might look at:


Semitic Writing from Pictograph to Alphabet, by Driver (OUP, 1976):
discussion of possible paths to the first alphabet

The World's Writing Systems, by Daniels (OUP, 1996): broad (yet
detailed) discussion of writing.

In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language, by me
(NYUP, 2004): Introduction to the issues and references to
all the major literature

Greek Writing from Knossos to Homer, by Woodard (OUP, 1997): extensive
discussion of Greek

The Proto-Sinaitic Inscriptions and Their Decipherment, by Albright
(OUP): first major discussion of what Albright believes could
be the precursors to the Semitic alphabet.

Civilization before Greece and Rome, by Saggs (Yale Univ. Press,
1989): the chapter on writing is, like the rest of the books,
amazing.

Specifically about Izbet Sartah, try Volume 4 of the 1977 issue of the
Journal of the Tel Aviv University Institute of Archaeology, which
contains two articles describing the find.

-Joel
..http://sci.tech-archive.net/Archive/sci.lang/2005-04/msg00683.html
.

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