Greek pottery at Al Mina in Syria and at other locations in what is now Jordan, Israel, and Syria. By the
first half of the eighth century BC, we find evidence of Greek pottery in Etruria in western Italy, and by
the middle of the eighth century in the vicinity of Rome. An Attic vase from this period has even been
found as far afield as the Atlantic coast of Spain.
“I remained in Egypt for seven years, accumulating many possessions in my dealings with the men
there, since they were all very generous. But when finally the eighth year came around a Phoenician
man who preys on others arrived, a man well versed in deception, who had already caused much
harm among men. With his clever talk he persuaded me to come to Phoenicia, where he had his
estates and his merchandise. For a full year I stayed there with him, but when the days and the
months reached their end and the seasons returned, with the year circling back on itself, he put me on
board his seagoing ship bound for Libya, falsely leading me to believe that I was joining him in a
business venture. But his aim was to sell me into slavery and make a huge profit.” (Homer, Odyssey
14.285–97, Odysseus pretending to be a Cretan returning from the Trojan War)The distribution of these pottery finds gives an indication of the spread of Greek trade during the
Geometric Period. To facilitate that trade, the Greeks began to establish trading posts in various places in
the Mediterranean, particularly in locations that would enable them to satisfy their growing demand for
metals and other luxury goods. In doing this, they came into increasing contact, and to some degree
competition, with the Phoenicians, a Semitic people who lived in a number of independent communities,
including the important cities of Tyre and Sidon, along the coast of what is now Lebanon and Syria.
Beginning in the ninth century BC, the expanding power of the Assyrian Empire required these Phoenician
cities to pay increasing amounts of tribute and put pressure on them to engage in ever more active trade
throughout the Mediterranean. By the eighth century, the Phoenicians had established themselves as the
most vigorous traders in the Mediterranean world, with trading posts and even full-scale colonies along
the north coast of Africa, on the coast of what is now Spain, and on the islands of Sicily, Sardinia, and
Cyprus. They were responsible for facilitating the contacts at this time between the Greeks and other
inhabitants of the Mediterranean, particularly with the civilizations of Egypt and western Asia, whose
traditions of figurative art and whose venerable literary heritage would decisively influence the
development of Greek culture at the end of the Dark Age. Indeed, the period from the middle of the eighth
to the middle of the seventh century BC is sometimes referred to as the “Orientalizing Period” of Greek
civilization because of the pervasiveness of motifs in art and literature that can be traced to Hittite or
Assyrian or Egyptian origins.
The Invention of the Alphabet
The most profound and lasting feature of eastern civilization that the Greeks adopted in the eighth century
was borrowed from the Phoenicians themselves. As we have seen in the case of the Greeks’
appropriation of many elements of Minoan civilization during the Mycenaean Period, and as we will see
repeatedly later, among the salient characteristics of Greek civilization are an openness to foreign
influence and the tendency to transform elements of that influence in subtle yet fundamental and enduring
ways. It will be recalled that from about 1200 BC until the eighth century there is no evidence of literacy
among the Greeks. The Phoenicians, however, like several of the peoples of Egypt and western Asia
during this period, possessed the knowledge of writing, and from their extensive contacts with them the
Greeks became familiar with the Phoenician system of writing. This form of writing, like the Hebrew
script, is a West Semitic writing system derived from the Proto-Canaanite script that was developed in the