existing system to the representation of the Greek language, for purely practical purposes. As with many
significant innovations in representational technology – consider, for example, the invention of maps, or
the decimal numeral system, or pie charts – it is the technology that transforms the way we think, not the
other way around. The usefulness of the alphabet was apparent from early on. By 700 BC the Greek
alphabet was adopted, with modifications, by the Etruscans and, later, by the speakers of other languages
spoken on the Italian peninsula, including Latin. The alphabet is now the standard means of representing
such non-Indo-European languages as Hungarian, Turkish, and Tagalog, and it is the basis of the
International Phonetic Alphabet.

“Those  Phoenicians who arrived with    Cadmus, when    they    settled in  this    country,    brought with    them

into    Greece  a   number  of  skills, the most    significant of  which   was literacy,   which   did not exist

previously  among   the Greeks, as  far as  I   can tell.   At  first   the Greeks  adopted the same    characters  that

the Phoenicians in  general use,    but in  the course  of  time,   as  the sound   of  the language    changed,    so  did

the shape   of  the letters.    At  that    time    it  was primarily   Ionian  Greeks  who lived   in  the region  near    the

Phoenicians,    and it  was the Ionians who learned writing from    them.   Although    they    made    some

alterations to  the shape   of  the letters they    still   called  the letters that    they    used    ‘Phoenician letters'    –

justifiably,    since   it  was the Phoenicians who had introduced  them    into    Greece.”    (Herodotus  5.58)

The Age of Expansion

The time at which the Greeks began to use these Phoenician characters to represent their own language
appears to have been early in the eighth century. The oldest known piece of Greek alphabetic writing,
discovered only recently, consists of a few letters that were scratched on a clay pot some time before
about 770 BC. This pot was found not in Greece but in Italy, east of Rome, providing further evidence of
the movement of Greeks and their goods at this time. Mention has been made of outposts that the Greeks
established in order to facilitate trade throughout the Mediterranean. Beginning in the eighth century BC,
however, they embarked on a period of expansion that saw the establishment not only of trading posts but
of new, and sometimes quite substantial, communities of Greeks living in areas that were not formerly
inhabited by Greeks. This period lasts from the beginning of the eighth century and extends into the fifth
century BC and represents the most significant expansion of the Greek world before the time of Alexander
the Great. During this time the Greeks established settlements, sometimes referred to as “colonies,” in
various places on the coast of the Mediterranean, including Italy, Sicily, and North Africa, as well as on
the coast of the Black Sea (map 5). Well over a hundred new Greek cities were founded during this
period, some of which became populous and powerful communities that went on to play significant roles
in later times. Some are thriving cities still today, like Catania, Istanbul, Marseilles, Naples, Nice, and
Syracuse, homes to nearly twenty million inhabitants. The population of Greece had grown considerably
in the course of the Geometric Period and that increase in population was surely one of the causes of this
expansion outside Greece proper, but almost certainly it was not the only cause. Those Greek
communities that had been most active in pursuing trade during the Geometric Period were also the ones
that were in the forefront of the movement to establish overseas settlements, so that the prospects of
economic improvement may have been as effective a motive as overcrowding at home. In some cases,
also, it appears that members of unsuccessful political factions were either encouraged or forced to
emigrate. Founding a new Greek city was preferable to living as an outsider in some already existing
alien community, especially since one’s chances of becoming a member of the “ruling faction” of a newly
founded city were enhanced if one had participated in its creation.