Then Came the Alphabet

When the palaces fell around 1200 BC (The End of the Palaces), Linear B fell with them. For about four centuries no one in Greece wrote anything we have found. When the Greeks wrote again, it was with a completely different system: an alphabet borrowed from the Phoenicians, the traders of the Levant coast.

Key idea

Around 800 BC the Greeks adapted the Phoenician letters to write Greek, adding letters for vowels. The Greek alphabet did not come from Linear B; by then Linear B had been forgotten.

Linear B ends with the palaces; the alphabet begins about four centuries later.

What the Greeks changed

The Phoenician script had about 22 letters, all for consonants; readers supplied the vowels. Greek has many words that begin or end with vowels, and some Phoenician letters stood for sounds Greek did not use. The Greeks reused those letters for vowels: Phoenician ʾalep became alpha (A), he became epsilon (E), and so on. The result was an alphabet with letters for vowels as well as consonants, the ancestor of the Latin letters you are reading now.

The word for gold in Linear B and in the Greek alphabet. The alphabet can show every sound; the syllabary cannot.

Two ways of writing Greek, about four centuries apart.
	Linear B	Greek alphabet
Kind	Syllabary with logograms	Alphabet
Number of sound signs	About 87	About 24
Shows every sound?	No: final and some other consonants are left out	Yes, very nearly
Used for	Palace accounts	Everything: poems, laws, letters, graffiti
Came from	Linear A (Crete)	Phoenician (the Levant)

Why it works

Why could the alphabet write Greek so much better? Because each letter is one sound, so clusters like khr- or final -s are easy: χρυσός. A syllabary of open syllables cannot write a consonant without a vowel, so Linear B had to bend Greek to fit, as you will see in Every Sign Ends in a Vowel. With an alphabet, writing spread beyond a few palace scribes to many people, and the first Greek poems written down, such as Homer's, followed.

Common mistake

Assuming the Greek alphabet grew out of Linear B. The shapes, the kind of script and the dates all say no: the alphabet came from Phoenician, and it appeared long after the last Linear B scribe had died. Check: alpha (Α) comes from the Phoenician letter ʾalep, not from the Linear B sign 𐀀.

Worked example: How long was the gap?

Linear B ended around 1200 BC and the alphabet appears around 800 BC. About how many years passed with no writing in Greece?

Both dates are BC, so subtract: 1200 − 800.
That is 400 years.

Answer: About 400 years.

Worked example: Spot the source

Which script is the Greek alphabet's parent: Linear B, Phoenician or Egyptian hieroglyphs?

The Greek letter names (alpha, beta, gamma) echo the Phoenician names (ʾalep, bet, gimel).
The shapes match Phoenician letters, and the date fits.

Answer: Phoenician.

Then Came the Alphabet

What the Greeks changed

Practice

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Sources and further reading