The Greek alphabet was created by adapting the Phoenician consonantal script and adding vowel letters, and the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey are the earliest substantial works this script carried. Yet the basic historical chain remains unfixed: when, where, and by what process the alphabet was created and first diffused (estimates in the literature range from c. 1000 to c. 700 BC, with argued extremes as early as the fourteenth century BC); how soon afterwards, by whom, and on what materials the Homeric poems were first written down (the dictation-theory scenario defended by Teodorsson in 2006); what happened to the text between that recording and the sixth-century Athenian phase and later editorial scholarship; and whether the poems go back to an individual poet at all. The problem asks for an evidence-based reconstruction of this whole chain, constrained by the surviving inscriptional, archaeological, and textual record.

Background

The Greek alphabet is an adaptation of the Phoenician consonantal alphabet (an abjad, writing only consonants), to which the Greek adapters assigned vowel letters, producing the first script that represented both consonants and vowels and could render Greek hexameter verse nearly phonetically. From its creation down to the late fifth century BC the alphabet existed as a family of local or 'epichoric' variants (Ionic, Euboean, Attic, etc.), catalogued region by region in L. H. Jeffery's Local Scripts of Archaic Greece (first published 1961; revised edition with a supplement by A. W. Johnston, 1990), which remains the epigraphic baseline: the earliest surviving alphabetic Greek inscriptions (dipinti — texts painted on pottery — and graffiti, such as the Dipylon oinochoe, a wine jug from Athens, and the 'Cup of Nestor' from Pithekoussai, an early Greek trading post in the Bay of Naples) cluster in the late eighth century BC. Because that is the earliest direct evidence, everything earlier must be inferred, and the date of the alphabet's creation is contested: Joseph Naveh's Early History of the Alphabet (1982) argued for adoption from the Phoenicians as early as the eleventh century BC, while the 'prevalent opinion' places the introduction in or shortly before the eighth century; Barry B. Powell's Homer and the Origin of the Greek Alphabet (1991) even argued for a single inventor working around 800 BC in order to record Homer. The Homeric side of the problem was reshaped by the oral-formulaic theory of Milman Parry and Albert Lord, which demonstrated that the Iliad and Odyssey are built from a traditional stock of formulaic phrases suited to extempore hexameter performance. How such orally composed poetry became a fixed written text has several competing models: Albert Lord's dictation thesis, according to which the poet dictates his own composition to a scribe — argued for the Homeric poems by Richard Janko ('The Homeric poems as oral dictated texts', 1998) and defended by Sven-Tage Teodorsson ('Eastern Literacy, Greek Alphabet, and Homer', Mnemosyne 59.2, 2006), who holds that recording happened in the eighth century BC, driven by three contemporary factors: intense Eastern (Near Eastern) cultural influence including literacy, the newly invented alphabet, and the genius of an individual Homer. Opposed to this stand the older 'analyst' and Pisistratean-recension views — the analysts being the nineteenth-century school that explained the poems' inconsistencies by positing multiple poets and successive layers of composition, and the Pisistratean recension being the ancient tradition that the sixth-century-BC Athenian ruler Peisistratus (or his sons) first collected and ordered the poems from scattered rhapsodic performance (rhapsodes being the professional reciters who performed Homer at festivals). Gregory Nagy's Homeric Questions (1996) offers an evolutionary alternative in which the text crystallized gradually through performance stages rather than at a single dictation or editorial event, while M. L. West's Studies in the Text and Transmission of the Iliad (2001) treats the textual history from the archaic poem to the Alexandrian scholars in detail and doubts a formal Peisistratean edition. Modern overviews that frame what remains open include Jonathan L. Ready's Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics: An Interdisciplinary Study of Oral Texts, Dictated Texts, and Wild Texts (2019), and for the alphabet itself the collected volumes Understanding Relations Between Scripts II: Early Alphabets (Philip J. Boyes and Philippa M. Steele eds., 2019) and The Early Greek Alphabets: Origin, Diffusion, Uses (Robert Parker and Philippa M. Steele eds., 2021).

Problem Statement

Evaluate the dictation-theory scenario defended by Teodorsson (2006) — according to which the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey were first written down in the eighth century BC by one or more scribes taking dictation — against its evolutionary-crystallization and late-recension rivals, and determine, on the combined evidence of Greek epigraphy, Mediterranean archaeology, linguistics, and textual criticism: (1) the date, place, and mechanism of the creation and earliest diffusion of the adapted Greek alphabet — including whether its adoption from the Phoenician script was a single event or several, in what region, and over what period it spread; (2) the circumstances of the first written recording of the Homeric poems — the interval between the alphabet's invention and that recording, the identity and social status of the scribes, their technical practices, and the writing materials employed; (3) the textual history between that recording and the later recensions — the degree and pattern of subsequent oral variation, the role of local reciter traditions, and what editorial interventions, if any, the tradition of a Pisistratean recension in sixth-century-BC Athens actually reflects; and (4) whether the poems trace to an individual historical poet ('Homer') or to a compositional persona, recognizing that this last component may be underdetermined by surviving evidence. Determinations (1)–(3) together constitute a historically evidenced reconstruction of this entire chain — from the invention of the script, through its use to record oral epic, to the early fixation and transmission of the text — that is consistent with the surviving inscriptional record (which currently begins c. 740 BC) and with the oral-formulaic character of the poems. Determination (4) may be resolved by a reasoned finding that the surviving evidence is underdetermined — that it cannot decide between an individual historical poet and a compositional persona.

References

  1. Sven-Tage Teodorsson, 'Eastern Literacy, Greek Alphabet, and Homer', Mnemosyne 59.2 (2006), pp. 161-187, DOI 10.1163/156852506777069709, https://doi.org/10.1163/156852506777069709 (defends the dictation-theory scenario for the first written recording of the Homeric poems)
  2. Joseph Naveh, Early History of the Alphabet: An Introduction to West Semitic Epigraphy and Palaeography, Brill, 1982, DOI 10.1163/9789004665583, https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004665583
  3. L. H. Jeffery, The Local Scripts of Archaic Greece: A Study of the Origin of the Greek Alphabet and its Development from the Eighth to the Fifth Centuries B.C., revised edition (with supplement by A. W. Johnston), Oxford University Press, 1990, DOI 10.1093/oso/9780198140610.001.0001, https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198140610.001.0001
  4. Barry B. Powell, Homer and the Origin of the Greek Alphabet, Cambridge University Press, 1991, DOI 10.1017/cbo9780511552700, https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511552700
  5. Richard Janko, 'The Homeric poems as oral dictated texts', Classical Quarterly 48.1 (1998), pp. 1-13, DOI 10.1093/cq/48.1.1, https://doi.org/10.1093/cq/48.1.1
  6. Gregory Nagy, Homeric Questions, University of Texas Press, 1996, DOI 10.7560/755611, https://doi.org/10.7560/755611
  7. M. L. West, Studies in the Text and Transmission of the Iliad, De Gruyter, 2001, DOI 10.1515/9783110963120, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110963120
  8. Willemijn Waal, 'Ouder dan je zou denken' [Older than you would think: on the origin of the Greek alphabet], Lampas 52.4 (2019), pp. 395-415, DOI 10.5117/lam2019.4.002.wall, https://doi.org/10.5117/lam2019.4.002.wall
  9. Philip J. Boyes and Philippa M. Steele (eds.), Understanding Relations Between Scripts II: Early Alphabets, Oxbow Books, 2019, DOI 10.2307/j.ctv2mm1xnh, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv2mm1xnh
  10. Willemijn Waal, 'Mother or sister? Rethinking the origins of the Greek alphabet and its relation to the other "western" alphabets', in Boyes & Steele (eds.), Understanding Relations Between Scripts II: Early Alphabets, 2019, pp. 109-124, DOI 10.2307/j.ctv2mm1xnh.11, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv2mm1xnh.11
  11. Philippa M. Steele, 'The development of Greek alphabets: Fluctuations and standardisations', in Boyes & Steele (eds.), Understanding Relations Between Scripts II: Early Alphabets, 2019, pp. 125-150, DOI 10.2307/j.ctv2mm1xnh.12, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv2mm1xnh.12
  12. Robert Parker and Philippa M. Steele (eds.), The Early Greek Alphabets: Origin, Diffusion, Uses, Oxford University Press, 2021, DOI 10.1093/oso/9780198859949.001.0001, https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198859949.001.0001
  13. Roger D. Woodard, 'Contextualizing the Origin of the Greek Alphabet', in Parker & Steele (eds.), The Early Greek Alphabets: Origin, Diffusion, Uses, Oxford University Press, 2021, pp. 74-104, DOI 10.1093/oso/9780198859949.003.0005, https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198859949.003.0005
  14. Rosalind Thomas, 'Writing and Pre-Writing in Early Archaic Methone and Eretria', in Parker & Steele (eds.), The Early Greek Alphabets: Origin, Diffusion, Uses, Oxford University Press, 2021, pp. 58-73, DOI 10.1093/oso/9780198859949.003.0004, https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198859949.003.0004
  15. Natalia Elvira Astoreca, Early Greek Alphabetic Writing: A Linguistic Approach, Oxbow Books, 2021, DOI 10.2307/j.ctv1tfw038, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1tfw038
  16. Jonathan L. Ready, Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics: An Interdisciplinary Study of Oral Texts, Dictated Texts, and Wild Texts, Oxford University Press, 2019, DOI 10.1093/oso/9780198835066.001.0001, https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198835066.001.0001
  17. Carlo M. Lucarini, La genesi dei poemi omerici, De Gruyter, 2019, DOI 10.1515/9783110652963, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110652963 (esp. ch. 16, 'La leggenda (orfica?) di Pisistrato editore di Omero, la critica analitica nell'antichità e la fase attica della tradizione omerica', pp. 397-415, DOI 10.1515/9783110652963-016, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110652963-016)
  18. James I. Porter, Homer: The Very Idea, University of Chicago Press, 2021, DOI 10.7208/chicago/9780226790077.001.0001, https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226790077.001.0001