Phoenicians: Inventors Or Brokers Of The Alphabet?

[Pantagathus]

As you may or may not know, symbolic elements of the Phoenician alphabet (which gave rise to everything since) are found in various places around Europe & the Near East before it's "invention" during the Iron Age.

 

Given the appearance of signs almost exactly the same as 'heth' & 'samekh' in Magdalenian cave paintings and on tablets from the Vinca Culture in Neolithic Romania, out of curiosity, who do you think actually invented it first?

 

Were the Phoenicians just brokers of this profound improvement in writing?

 

Note: This was supposed to have a poll attached... Don't know where it went?

[Viggen]

I added the poll now...

 

cheers

viggen

[Pantagathus]

I added the poll now...

 

cheers

viggen

 

Thanks Viggen,

 

I had a bunch of poll choices to provoke certain aspects of the discussion but this will do quite fine.

[Primus Pilus]

Not being a linguist, this is perhaps not an appropriate subject for me to comment on, but without the Phoenicians, the form of at least the western alphabet would be a completely different animal. Too much credit always seems to be given to the Greek 'alpha' and 'beta' understandably so, but the Phoenician influence is undeniable.

 

Perhaps I'm simply repeating a 'known' ideal here, but considering that phoenician words and roots are found in such languages as the pre suggested Greek, Latin, Egyptian, Arabic, Aramaic, Hebrew, etc., I'm hard pressed to ignore the influence even without formal study. Forgive my ignorance, but looking at the Phoenician originals I even see some startling similarities to Germanic runes. Considering the relatively young age of the runic languages I suppose that isn't surprising but it certainly attests to the influence of the original.

[Pantagathus]

Forgive my ignorance, but looking at the Phoenician originals I even see some startling similarities to Germanic runes. Considering the relatively young age of the runic languages I suppose that isn't surprising but it certainly attests to the influence of the original.

 

That was actually one of my choices in the vanished poll: Celtic-Germanic Runes. For this very reason it's a great thought provoking point. Almost all the letters found in Phoenician & Etruscan are found in Runes.

 

Obvioulsy, the Phoenicians are well deserved in their credit for the changeover from laborious cuniform & heiroglyphic systems that spread from the Levant to the rest of the western world.

 

But, when confronted with the existence of the letter-symbols utilized by the Phoenicians in far distant locals that pre-date the Near Eastern change over (in some cases thousands of years) from cuniform & heiroglyphic writing systems, does it not feel a little suspect?

 

As merchants, they would obviously like to have a system that was not as laborious or bureaucratic as cuniform or heiroglyphics but the Mesopotamian & Egyptian civilizations had got along for quite along time with those systems...

 

Why the sudden drive to radically change the method? Especially when so many scholars also maintain that the Phoenician economy at the time (early Iron Age) was driven by the need to feed the Assyrian & Egyptian machines? Did the Bronze Age collapse scare them that much? And forget for the moment that this whole cloth invention is attributed to the mythical King Cadmus.

 

"Men tell us . . . that the Phoenicians were not the first to make the discovery of letters; but

that they did no more than change the form of the letters; whereupon the majority of mankind

made use of the way of writing them as the Phoenicians devised." - Diodorus Siculus, Book V

[Pertinax]

Would I be foolish in suggesting that the Assyrian war machine represented a serious radicalisation of warfare, both in duration and deadliness of combat and that therefore the logistical tools needed ( of whatever nature) would need to be radicalised and streamlined? If your client now fights in winter as well as other seasons you have a seriously expanded logistics train, (indeed a constant one, with the abolition of a campaign season).If your goal is commerce then " your salesmen drive the business". If you are a good businessman you might have some technical tools saved for a rainy day-so maybe id say the Phonecians assimilated , synthesised and then deployed as clients upped the pace.

 

But I am no linguist!

[Pantagathus]

Would I be foolish in suggesting that the Assyrian war machine represented a serious radicalisation of warfare, both in duration and deadliness of combat and that therefore the logistical tools needed ( of whatever nature) would need to be radicalised and streamlined? If your client now fights in winter as well as other seasons you have a seriously expanded logistics train, (indeed a constant one, with the abolition of a campaign season).If your goal is commerce then " your salesmen drive the business". If you are a good businessman you might have some technical tools saved for a rainy day-so maybe id say the Phonecians assimilated , synthesised and then deployed as clients upped the pace.

 

But I am no linguist!

 

Well the Assyrians did adopt the new writing style in the form of early Aramaic as early as the 10th Century so that is a possibility. But that early on, the pressure on Phoenicia from Assyria was light and Phoenician trade was focused more on Egypt at the time (but not for long due to Hiram I's reorganizations)

 

For the sake of exploring possibilities, let's step out of the Near Eastern vacuum for a second and consider the reach of the Phoenicians even at that early of a date. Though the date assigned to the founding of Cadiz by men of Tyre is constantly debated (~1000BC-~800BC), one thing most scholars agree on is that at least a form of silent trade between the Iberians & traders of Tyre had gone on for sometime. Coincidentaly during the exact time that Phoenicians introduced the alphabet to all their neighbors in the east.

 

Now consider that the earliest examples of utilizing elements (characters) later found in the Phoenician alphabet occur in Magdalenian Culture art from northern Iberia (12000BC-9000BC).

 

Then consider Plato's 'Critias' account and his literate "Atlantics", 'Beyond the Pillar of Hercules'

 

Then consider Strabo's anecdote about the Turditani; that they alleged to have laws & poems written in verse that were 6000 years old.

 

And of course, Iberians both in the north (Celtiberia) & south (Tartessus) utilized an alphabet that has always been said to be 'based on the Phoenician and/or Greek'. Simple enough. But, the northern form was utilized early on in areas of Celtiberia that were not in direct contact with the Phoenicians or Greeks though the two were present on the peninsula. Of course it's more than possible that the internal Iberian trade network was the agent of that diffusion. However, in the context of the time, the Iberian Peninsula was a very big place.

 

With that in mind, why did the alphabet not have a similar diffusion into Gaul from Massalia if it was so beneficial to trade for the indigenous population in the interior? Ogham remained their dominant writing system for some time.

 

So, given all that is it not possible for the Phoenicians, during one of their early trade expeditions to the west to have learned this different approach to writing which they then brought back and introduced to their neighbors?

 

On the other hand, one potential issue has to do with the use of vowels. Phoenician, like Hebrew wrote only consonants. Though knowledge of ancient Iberian languages is lost to us and all Iberian inscriptions sit undecifered, it is apparently clear that their alphabets incorporated limited use of vowels which is accepted as the Greeks addition to its use. Regardless, given our limited knowledge on the issue and that our accepting the use of vowels comes from Roman era documents only listing names, it is by no means a show stopper

[Lacertus]

Were the Phoenicians just brokers of this profound improvement in writing?

I think yes, the were like brokers only. In spite of the fact that Phoenician alphabet was very old (13-14BC) it was adopted too from other alfabet.

The Bronze age excavations in Ugarit (Ras Shamra) showed that two branches of culture existed in proto-Phoenicia; and two alphabets were too. The first, which was adapted to the Ugaric language, used 30 signs. Its "nails", which are cuneiforms signs, point from left to right. The second system requires only 22 signs; they point left. The cuneiform signs were replaced by more linear signs, and they in turn are the basic types of the Greek alphabet.

In addition to using the two new system that were developed in 13-14 BC, the main benefit of which was to facilitate the recording of economic data, the scribes did occasionaly prefer to use Egyptian hieroglyphs for the records of local members dynasty. In this they were following the example of the scribes of Byblos, who were the actually developing their own system of "pseudohieroglyphs".

I think the Phoenician alphabet is reductive Egyptian only. But Phoenicians extended own alphabet on the most part of Mediterranean area.

 

Runes... I suggest the Runes and the Phoenician (and other last) alphabet are the two absolutely different ways of writing development. They existed nearly at the same time but have different locations and roots. But Runes became transformed under the Phoenician's influence later.