αρχαία Ελλάδα (Ancient Greece) The Birthplace of Western Civilization Marshall High School Mr. Cline Western Civilization I: Ancient Foundations Unit Three AC
Mycenaeans Greek Myth Characters Though Mycenae was long dead, Mycenaen culture lived on in the myths, religion, plays, poems, politics, art, and architecture of ancient Greece. Before we can examine these writings, we have to examine the history of a unique invention, particular to Greece, and that is the alphabet In the previous unit, we saw how writing enabled the peoples of the Fertile Crescent to form cities, conquer their neighbors and build empires. With a tool so valuable as writing, it is not surprising that some clever people would attempt to refine it. However, not all writing systems are created equal.
If you want your words to be remembered and learned by as many people as possible, what you write does not matter nearly as much as how you write it As you may recall, the first writing appeared about 3,500 B.C. This early cuneiform was merely a collection of drawings or pictographs. In this system, every word had its own corresponding drawing. The Problems with Cuneiform Communicating via pictographs has several limitations: 1. If someone is bad at drawing, then your message might be lost. You might think you had 300 horses instead of 300 cattle.
The Problems with Cuneiform Communicating via pictographs has several limitations: 2. It is difficult to represent something abstract with a picture. It's easy to draw a picture of a cow. It is less easy to draw a picture of say, 'equality.' Even if a society had a word for such a thing, without a way to write it down, development of such an idea would be very slow. 3. If every word has its own symbol, you end up with a massive writing system with thousands of characters. This makes a writing system very hard to learn, resulting in a low literacy rate. The fewer people who can read and write, the less useful writing is.
The Problems with Cuneiform Solving the Problems of Cuneiform Conversely, the more people who can read and write, the more useful writing is. Some smart people realized this and decided to find ways to make the writing system more simple and, thus, more accessible to more people. Over 3000 years, cuneiform underwent some drastic changes to overcome these limitations. To solve problem 1, drawings came to be replaced with the wedge shaped summaries we now recognize as proper cuneiform
Solving the Problems of Cuneiform To solve problem 2, symbols came to represent the sounds, or phonemes, of the words they represented, instead of the things themselves. This was a huge development. It moved the subject of writing from objects in the real world to sounds in the spoken language. Now, though I cannot come up with a symbol for equality, I can still write it: eye-quail-eye-tea, equality. Hooray! This style of writing, called symbolic phonemes, would reach its apex in Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Phonemes The breakdown into phonemes, in turn, began to solve problem 3. Though there are thousands of things one might want to write about, there are only so many sounds a human being can make. Since you only need one symbol for each sound, many redundancies are removed. If I tried to write cat, cattle and catalog, in the old style, I would've needed a unique character for cat, a unique character for cattle and a unique character for catalog.
Phonemes With this new style, I can spell cat with the symbol for cat. I can spell cattle with the symbol for cat and the symbol for tail. And catalog can be spelled with the symbol for cat, the symbol for tail and the symbol for log, spelling cat-tail-log. Thus, any time I want to represent a particular sound, I can use the same symbol. With this refinement, cuneiform was reduced from thousands of characters to about 400. This allowed literacy to expand and empires to grow in size.
The Characters of the Alphabet Yet, even with this dramatic reduction, anyone trying to read Cuneiform would still need to learn those 400 characters. This might not seem so bad to someone who can read Chinese, which still holds onto thousands of characters. But we Westerners, used to a mere 26 characters, would find this daunting, to say the least. So how did we get down from 400 characters to 26? The Phoenicians seem to have begun this process. About 1050 BC, the Phoenicians did away with the symbolic pictographs of cuneiform and invented simple characters to represent specific sounds.
The Characters of the Alphabet But the Phoenicians did not stop there. Rather than having a character for each syllable the Phoenecians recognized the distinction between vowels and consonants. They noticed that the 'K' sound remains the same in all of these syllables. From there, they simply assigned a character to each consonant. By doing so, they were able to reduce the 400 characters of cuneiform to a mere 22 characters, one for each consonant. With its limited number of characters, the Phoenecian alphabet soon replaced all other writing forms in the West.
The Characters of the Alphabet By the end of the Neo-Assyrian empire, it had replaced cuneiform. All future alphabets would be derived from the Phoenecian model. The Greek Alphabet Hebrew and Arabic are modern examples of a Phoenician-style alphabet or abjad, where characters represent only consonants, and the reader must supply the vowels from context. The inclusion of vowels in an alphabet was a distinctly Greek invention. The Greeks got their version of the Phonetic alphabet from the Minoans, who used a script we now call Linear A. Bronze Age Greeks from Mycenae used Linear A, with some small adaptations to write in Greek. We call this script Linear B.
The Greek Alphabet These writing systems were abjads, consonant only alphabets like the Phoenician model. Around 730 BC, a Greek wanted to write down the epic poems of Homer. This proved problematic, as Greek poetry requires one to record the length of vowel sounds. So, the Greeks came up with characters for seven vowels. It is interesting to note that we only have five. Recording the lengths of vowels was so important to the Greeks that they felt the need to distinguish a long 'E' (eta) from a short 'E' (epsilon) and a Long 'O' (Omega) from a short 'O' (omicron) From this fact, some have suggested that what we now recognize as an alphabet was probably invented for the sole purpose of writing poetry.
The Greek Alphabet This easy-to-use alphabet created a level of literacy in Greece unmatched in the ancient world. The increased nuance in writing allowed the Greeks to invent new disciplines of history and philosophy. Finally, the ability to record the artistic value of words with vowels as well as their more practical functions, allowed the Greeks to dazzle the world and all civilizations to follow with new inventions: epic, poetry, tragedy, and comedy.