Re-drawing the Map? cism which suggests that the composition of the narrative books of the He-
brew Bible was broadly contemporary with that of classical Greek literature
from Homer to Xenophon, it is also the archaeological evidence of scraps of
writing on pottery which shows that writing in the Greek language and the
Greek alphabetic script appears in the eighth century.., just after writing
in Hebrew in an alphabetic script did likewise. It is archaeological evidence
also which shows how close the ‘‘palaeo-Hebrew’’ script then in use was to
Phoenician script, and how close the two languages were to each other. It is
this extensive new evidence, therefore, which gives so much more signifi-
cance to what we knew all along from Herodotus, that the Greek alphabet
derived from ‘‘Phoenician letters.’’ The suggestion of an alternative ‘‘ancient
history,’’ in which not just the origins of Greek culture but the whole of
Greek history up to the Islamic conquests would be seen in its wider Eastern
Mediterranean or Near Eastern context, is in a sense no more than a return
to cultural and religious origins. But it gains its point, as an intellectual exer-
cise which might be conducted in the twenty-first century, from the total
transformation of our capacity to confront the material evidence directly.