for some time before the oldest surviving examples of runic
script were written. Early runic inscriptions consist for the
most part only of names, perhaps of the person who made the
object bearing the inscription or the object’s owner. In the
Middle Ages some longer inscriptions were made to record,
for example, the lives of important people. Once a particular
German tribe was converted to Christianity, the people gen-
erally ceased to use runes and began to use the standard Latin
alphabet of the new Christian writings.
A major eff ort was made in the ancient period to equip
a language from northern Europe with its own alphabet. It
was carried out by Christian missionaries in connection with
translating the Bible into the target language. Th is was the
Gothic alphabet, created to accommodate the language spo-
ken by the Germanic tribe of the Visigoths. Th ey originated
in southern Sweden and migrated as far as the Crimean Pen-
insula in the southern Ukraine before turning to the Roman
Empire and eventually conquering and settling in Spain.
Th is language is not ancestral to modern German and died
out not long aft er 700 c.e. Th is was because Gothic speak-
ers gradually adopted the Latin language that was spoken by
their Spanish subjects. However, in the mid-fourth century
c.e. Bishop Ulfi las (ca. 311–ca. 382 c.e.) translated the Greek
text of the Bible into the Gothic language for the benefi t of
Visigoths then living in Moesia (modern-day Bulgaria). Most
of the Bibles transcribed in Gothic were eventually destroyed
because Ulfi las was later denounced as an Arian heretic (that
is, as holding disapproved ideas about the Christian Trinity),
but a few hundred pages have survived from various hand-
written manuscripts of the Gothic Bible. Th ese texts are ex-
tremely important for the study of the history of languages
(philology), since they are by many centuries the oldest sub-
stantial texts written in any Germanic language.
Ulfi as invented a new alphabet for writing the Gothic
language, which before had never been written. (A very small
number of runic inscriptions, however, are possibly Gothic.)
In general he used contemporary Greek letters. In some case
the pronunciation of a letter was changed to fi t the needs of
the Gothic languages. A small number of other letters were
borrowed from Latin, such as the F, whose sound did not pre-
cisely exist in Greek. Some scholars suspect, however, that
these letters may instead have been borrowed from the runic
alphabet since the runes were themselves derived from Latin.
Th e names of the Gothic letters, in any case, are derived from
those of a runic alphabet. Furthermore, these Gothic letters
are diff erent from the style of handwriting in the Latin alpha-
bet commonly called Gothic in the sense of belonging to the
medieval period.GREECE
BY MICHAEL J. O’NEAL
Among the nations of Europe the Greeks were the fi rst to
write using an alphabet rather than such writing systems as
pictographs used in other ancient cultures. Th e Greek alpha-bet formed the basis of the Roman alphabet, which in turn
spread throughout Europe and much of the world. Th us the
ancient Greek alphabet was the foundation on which western
writing systems were built.
Th e genealogy of the Greek alphabet begins with the
Proto-Sinaitic script, sometimes called Proto-Canaanite,
which emerged from Egypt and spread throughout the west-
ern regions of the Middle East that Egypt controlled. Begin-
ning in about 1100 b.c.e. an important trunk of this family
tree of languages was developed by the Phoenicians, who
wrote using a 22-letter alphabet with no vowels. Th e Greeks
adopted the Phoenician alphabet and later adapted some of
its letters to form vowels. Interestingly, many of these letters
had pictographic meanings of their own, meanings that, with
a little imagination, can still be seen in the Greek and Ro-
man alphabets. Th us the letter M (Greek mu) originated in
the Phoenician script as the letter mem, which means “water”
and was formed to suggest the peaks and troughs of a wave.
Similarly, the Phoenician letter heth, which means “fence,”
evolved into the H, which bears some resemblance to two
fence posts with a cross rail. Th e ancient Phoenician letter O
also meant “eye.” Th ese similarities are not accidental.
In about 800–750 b.c.e. numerous dialects of Greek began
emerging, each using a variant of the ancient script, though
the dialect called Ionic and its script became the standard in
the fi ft h century b.c.e. Another important dialect was the
Eurobean, which the Greeks carried to their colonies on the
Italian Peninsula, where it was adopted by the Etruscans and
eventually evolved into the Roman alphabet. A third impor-
tant dialect of Greek that predated these, called Mycenaean,
was spoken on the island of Crete and parts of the southern
Greek mainland. Th e only record of this dialect is a written
script called Linear B, which was written from about 1500 to
1200 b.c.e. Th is script consists of many symbols that repre-
sent variously letters and syllables. Historians regard it as a
kind of “proto” Greek, and deciphering it was a lengthy and
laborious process. (Linear A is the name given to the written
script that predated Linear B on Crete.)
Writing, along with art and architecture, was one of the
highest achievements of ancient Greek civilization. Origi-
nally, Greek was written right to left. Sometimes written texts
“snaked” their way down the page, with the text going from
right to left , continuing on the next line from left to right, and
so on. Th e ancient Greeks used writing materials common
among ancient civilizations, including the Romans. One was
a metal stylus, similar to a pen, for inscribing letters on tab-
lets covered with wax. Th e letters could be rubbed out with
the fl at end of the stylus, making the wax tablet reusable.
Th e ancient Greeks also wrote on papyrus, a type of early
paper that came from the papyrus plant. To make papyrus,
fi rst long slits were made along the length of the plant, and
then the material was unrolled. Material from the pith, or
center, of the plant worked particularly well. Th e unrolled
strips were placed side by side vertically, and then additional
strips were affi xed horizontally to hold the materials together.writing: Greece 11890895-1194_Soc&Culturev4(s-z).i1189 1189 10/10/07 2:31:24 PM