Greek Alphabet May Be Centuries Older Than Thought

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The Greek alphabet may be centuries older than the history books say. In a lecture in Athens this week, Leiden University scholar Willemijn Waal argued that alphabetic writing reached Greece around or before 1050 BC, roughly 250 to 300 years earlier than the date most classicists accept, and that the first Greek texts simply did not survive.

The Dipylon oinochoe, an ancient Athenian wine jug with an early Greek alphabet inscription scratched on its shoulder — The Dipylon oinochoe, an ancient Athenian wine jug

Waal, an associate professor at Leiden in the Netherlands, presented the case on Monday, October 12, at the Netherlands Institute at Athens. The talk, "The real age of the Greek alphabet," draws on her new five-year research project, From Aleph to Alpha, which runs from 2026 to 2031 with a Vici grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO).

The textbook story of the Greek alphabet

The standard account goes back to an influential 1933 article by the American scholar Rhys Carpenter. After the Mycenaean palaces fell around 1200 BC, Linear B, the syllabic script the Mycenaeans used to write an early form of Greek, went out of use. Greece then entered a long stretch often called the Dark Age, with no writing at all for roughly four centuries.

In this version, Greeks borrowed the alphabet from Phoenician traders in or shortly before the 8th century BC and added letters for vowels. The new script then spread quickly across the Greek world, which at the time included western Anatolia and southern Italy, and gave rise to other alphabets around the Mediterranean. Herodotus credited the arrival of letters to Cadmus, a Phoenician prince.

Waal has called this the idea of an "alphabetic bang," a script appearing and branching out almost overnight. Her lecture abstract goes further, arguing that there was "no long illiterate 'Dark Age' in the Aegean."

Why the date may be wrong

The first line of evidence is radiocarbon dating. The earliest certain Greek inscriptions come from the Late Geometric period, traditionally dated to about 760 to 700 BC. New carbon 14 results suggest that period began at least a century earlier, which would push the oldest surviving inscriptions on pottery back to the 9th or even the 10th century BC.

The second is variety. The oldest Greek inscriptions do not show one standard script. Researchers have counted 33 local versions spread over a wide area. Waal argues that so many regional forms are hard to explain if the alphabet had only just arrived.

The third is how those early texts were written. Some ran right to left, some left to right, and some in boustrophedon, where the direction switches with every line, the way an ox plows a field. Some also used word dividers. Those habits match older West Semitic writing from before about 1050 BC. By the 8th century BC, Phoenician writing ran only right to left.

So where are the older texts? Waal suggests that early writing was mostly used for trade and record keeping, on papyrus, wax tablets, wooden boards, leather or palm leaves. None last long in the Greek climate. She also notes that the Greek word phoinix, long read as a reference to the Phoenicians, can also mean the palm tree, whose leaves could serve as a writing surface.

A sister script, not the mother of all alphabets

The research also questions the Greek alphabet's place as the parent of other early scripts. Phrygian, Lydian and Carian writing, used in what is now Turkey, were long thought to descend from Greek. The earliest Phrygian inscriptions have now been dated to around 800 BC, as old as or older than the earliest surviving Greek ones, and they share some letters that Greek does not use.

Waal's proposal is that Greek and these Western and Anatolian alphabets all came from a shared, still unknown ancestor. In that picture, Greek is a sister of the other scripts rather than their mother. The Phoenician link at the root of the family tree is not in question, only the timing and the order of the branches.

It is worth stressing that this is a scholarly argument, not a settled finding. Waal first argued for a date in the 11th century BC at the latest in a 2018 paper, and her project is built to test it. Many classicists still hold to the 8th century, and only an early find on a durable surface would settle the question.

Where to see Greece's earliest writing

Visitors to Athens can see one of the key pieces in this debate. The Dipylon oinochoe, a wine jug made around 740 to 730 BC and found near the Dipylon gate of the ancient city, is on display at the National Archaeological Museum. Scratched on its shoulder, right to left, is a line of verse saying the jug goes to the dancer who performs most gracefully. It is often called the oldest readable text in the Greek alphabet.

For a primer on the letters themselves, see our guide to the Greek alphabet, and for the bigger picture, our overview of Greek history. The museum fits easily into a day in the city alongside other things to do in Athens, and the alphabet later carried the work of the ancient Greek philosophers.