Chapter 2: Alphabets

The Minoan Civilization

2800 BCE

The Minoan civilization that existed on the Mediterranean island of Crete ranks behind only Egypt and Mesopotamia in its early level of advancement in the ancient Western world. Minoan or Cretan picture symbols were in use as early as 2800 B.C.

Phoenicians

2000 BCE

During the second millennium B.C., the Phoenicians became seafaring merchants whose ships linked settlements throughout the Mediterranean region. Influences and ideas were absorbed from other areas, such as cuneiform from Mesopotamia in the west and Egyptian hieroglyphics and scripts from the south

Sui Generis Writing System

2000 BCE

Around 2000 B.C., the Phoenicians developed an early alphabetic writing system called sui generis, which was a script devoid of any pictorial meaning.

Short Pictographic Inscriptions

2000 BCE

Short pictographic inscriptions were written as early as 2000 B.C. have been found. About 135 pictographs survive; they include figures, arms, other parts of the body, animals, plants, and some geometric symbols.

Phaistos Disk

1700 BCE

Was discovered in Crete in 1908, the Phaistos Disk contains pictographic and seemingly alphabetic forms imprinted on both sides in spiral bands. Was the home of a Bronze Age civilization called the Minoans.

Pictograph tranformation

1700 BCE

By 1700 B.C. pictographs seem to have yielded to linear scriptwriting, a possible precursor to the Greek alphabet.

Sinaitic Script

1500 BCE

Around 1500 B.C., Semitic workers in Egyptian turquoise mines in the Sinai desert developed an acrophonic adaptation of Egyptian hieroglyphics called Sinaitic script. In an acrophonic system, pictorial symbols or hieroglyphs are used to represent the initial sound of the object depicted.

Phoenician alphabet is adopted by the Greeks

1000 BCE

The Phoenician alphabet was adopted by the ancient Greeks and spread through their city-states around 1000 B.C. The Greeks changed five consonants to vowels and, most importantly, they modified the Phoenician characters by making them more geometrically structured.

Boustrophedon

1000 BCE

When the Greeks adopted Phoenician writing, they developed a writing method called boustrophedon, which means alternating left to right and right to left.

The Latin alphabet

1000 BCE

The Latin alphabet came to the Romans from Greece by way of the Etruscans who dominated the Italian peninsula in the first millennium B.C.

Oral Culture

400 BCE

In the fourth century B.C., Alexander the Great expanded Greek culture throughout the ancient world, including Egypt, Mesopotamia, and India. Reading and writing had become more important by this time because an oral culture no longer had the capacity to contain and document knowledge and information.

The Codex

400 BCE

A revolutionary design format that came to be used increasingly in
Rome and Greece beginning at the time of Christ. The durability and permanence of this format appealed to Christians because their writings were considered sacred. The codex was the historical ancestor of the modern book. Instead of being composed of sheets of paper, it used sheets of vellum, papyrus, or other materials. The term codex is often used for ancient manuscript books, with handwritten contents.

The Roman letter G

250 BCE

The Roman letter G was designed by Spurius Carvilius around
250 B.C. to replace the Greek zeta, which at the time was of little value to the Romans. After this addition, the Latin alphabet contained twenty-one letters.

Roman alphabet

100 BCE

Around the first century B.C., the Roman alphabet—the forerunner of the contemporary English alphabet—contained twenty-three letters. The letters J, V, and W were added during the Middle Ages. The J is an outgrowth of the I, which was lengthened to indicate use with consonantal force, particularly as the first letter of some words. Both U and W are variants of V, which was used for two different sounds in England.

Capitalis Quadrata

200

The most important form of the Roman written hand, this style, which was written carefully and slowly with a flat pen, was widely used from the second century A.D. until the fifth century.

The Hangul alphabet

1446

The Hangul alphabet, which was introduced by the Korean monarch Sejong by royal decree in A.D. 1446, consists of fourteen consonants represented by abstract depictions of the mouth and tongue.