Carpenter, Rhys_Early Ionian Writing_1935_AJPh, 56, 4, Pp. 291-301

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Early Ionian WritingAuthor(s): Rhys CarpenterReviewed work(s):Source: The American Journal of Philology, Vol. 56, No. 4 (1935), pp. 291-301Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/289967 .

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EARLY IONIAN WRITING.

Although everyone is aware that the Ionic alphabet employed

special symbols for long E and long 0, it is apparently notcommon knowledge that the approximate date of introductionof these symbols can be ascertained. The present paper arguesthat no student of early Ionian literature, and particularly nostudent of Homer, can afford to ignore the seemingly trivial

history of these two letters.

As the Ionicalphabetic symbols

for X and o were not con-

temporary inventions, they must be treated separately.The Northwest Semitic (presumably Phoenician) parent

script employed a symbol, heth, from which Greek B was imme-

diately derived, and gave to this the value of an aspirate. Boththe symbol and its approximate value were accepted and pre-served by practically all the Greek communities when writingwas introduced into the Hellenic world. But in the east of thearea in which the Ionic dialect

prevailed,on the Asia Minor

coast and its immediately adjacent islands, no isolable aspirate,no true " h " existed. Hence while the Semitic letter heth was

probably called heta quite correctly by most of the Greeks, justas beth was called beta, it could only have been called 'eta bythese Ionians; and on the normal acrophonic principle the

symbol, which could not stand for "h"' in Ionia, should haveobtained the value of an "e ". As the Greek ear could dis-

tinguish at least two qualities of the E-vowel in thespokenlanguage, it was inevitable that the symbol E should be assigned

to one and B to the other of these.We may infer, in passing, that the Phoenician alphabet did

not enter Greece exclusively through Ionia, since otherwise heta

by becoming 'eta would have been lost as a symbol for " h" tothe rest of the Greek-speakingworld. We may also infer thatthe supplementary (so-called non-Phoenician) symbols P andX were of Ionic invention, since the Ionians, like the otherGreeks, could distinguish two qualities of " p" and two quali-ties of "k ", but unlike the other Greeks (who could indicatethese sounds by P and rp, and by K and KB) they could notwrite these sounds in terms of their " h "-less alphabet. Hencea special symbol had to be invented for " p' " in distinction tonormal pi and another for " kEi"in distinction to normal "I ".

291



RHYS CARPENTER.

Since only the psilotic lonians would have been thus embar-

rassed, it must be they who invented this solution.It is tempting to push inference one step farther to concludethat the "East Greek" usage, being Ionian, must be primaryand hence older than the "West Greek." In that case, the"West Greek,"and Latin, usage of the symbol " X " must havebeen derivedfrom the combinationIc's( X) with the i droppedas superfluous by a people who had no other use or knowledgeof the X-symbol. Having thus shut themselves off from usingthe

symbol" X "

as k', but desiring to improve onK

B, these" West Greeks" seem to have seized on the next available Ionicsymbol (Y) for their purpose. But they thereby deprivedthemselves of any symbol for the combination "p's" and werethus obliged to continue in the old way, writing (P', unless, likeOzolian Lokris, they chose to invent something entirely new forthe purpose. The apparently inexplicable differences betweenthe " East Greek" and the " West Greek" alphabets, familiarfrom

every epigraphical handbook, are thus not inexplicableat all.

This series of inferences cannot be invalidated ab initio bysupposing that the Ionian cities originally accepted the Semiticvalue "h" for the heta symbol and only later sloughed it off.Since the alphabet does not appear in Greece until the finalphase of the Geometric period (the late VIIIth century B. C.),and since no one will be anxious to maintain that the AsiaticIonic dialect became

psiloticat so late a

period of its develop-ment, it follows that the Eastern Ionic cities could never haveused B as "h" for the simple reason that none of their wordscontained that sound.

Hence no Asiatic Ionic 1 inscription or manuscript, no matterwhat its date, can ever have employed the letter B or H as " h."

The converse dogma, that every Asiatic Ionic inscription ormanuscript, no matter what its date, must employ the specificsymbol B or H for

longE, is

equallytrue.

Superficiallyit

might be urged that the practice could have been introduced into

The evidence of inscriptions shows that "psiloticism," or theabsence of the aspirate, was characteristic of Miletus, Ephesus, Clazo-menae, Phocaea, Teos, Chios, Erythrae, and Samos; its existence is alsoimplied for Halicarnassus (Bechtel, Die griechischen Dialekte, III, pp.36-37).

292




Ionian writing at some later (though, of course, still very early)

date,since the lonians

mighthave

arbitrarily adopted theirneighbors' "IIH as a vowel at any period. But this argumenttoo is faulty; for the very existence of a special symbol for longas opposed to short E implies a luxury, not a need. Preciselybecause they had an extra symbol on their hands when the

alphabet first came to them, the lonians were faced with an

original necessity either of discarding the superfluous symbolaltogether or else finding some use for it. This dilemma wouldnot

recur,once a method of

writinghad been established. Hence

the symbol E would either have been entirely missing fromAsiatic Ionic writing or from the start have had its value as eta.In agreement with this is the observation that no other Greek

alphabet ever felt the need of inventing a special symbol for

long E (though in course of time they were all persuaded to

accept the Ionian symbol already in use).The date of the introduction of the symbol for long E into

Asiatic Ionic writing is therefore the same as the introductionof the alphabet itself into Ionia. Even if the exact date of thisevent be disputed, the important conclusion still holds: no AsiaticIonic manuscript can ever have written 3 or H for "h" or

failed to distinguish between long E and short.After this v-symbol (8) had been in use for several genera-

tions, its form was abruptly changed to H. The reason for the

change is unknown; but the date of the event can be determined

very closely. There is a considerable accumulation of archaic

(sixth century B. C.) statuary from Milesian and Samian terri-

tory, and nearly a dozen of these pieces bear dedicatory inscrip-tions.2 As the statues can be placed in chronological sequenceby their style, the inscriptions can be arranged in historicalorder. Fragments of the reliefs of column drums from theArtemisium at Ephesus, with remains of the dedicatory inscrip-tion of Croesusof Lydia, introduce a fixed point into this series,further strengthened by more or less certain historical identifica-

tions of some of the dedicators of the other statuary, notably theequation of the Aeakes of one of the Samian dedications 3 with

2 The Milesian material: Pryce, Catalogue of Sculpture in the Dept.of Greek and Roman Antiquities of the British Museum, I, 1: B 273,B 278, B 281, with facsimiles of the inscriptions Figs. 166, 168, 170, 172.The Samian material: Buschor, Alt-Samische Standbilder (1934).

8 Athenische Mitteilungen, XXXI (1906), pp. 152-153.

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RHYS CARPENTER.

the Aiakes of Herodotus.4 In addition, the progress of sculp-

tural archaeology has been sufficient to lend very considerablecredibility to Buschor's attempts to assign absolute dates to theSamian statues on purely stylistic grounds. Combining thisevidence, it becomes apparent that the open form of H can betraced back in Ionia to about 570 B. C., before which the closedform B is alone in use.5 With either form the value of the

symbol is, of course, invariably y.The case for Q is entirely different. The specific symbol can

be traced backonly

so far as the firstquarter

of the sixthcenturyB. C. In the few Ionic writings earlier than 570 B. C. we find

the symbol "0 " used indifferently for the short and the longform of the vowel. The distinction between e and V is therefore

primary but accidental, while the distinction between o and wis subsequent and deliberate, due to reasoning by analogy.Hence H has its immemorial (Semitic) position in the standardGreek alphabet while Q as a newcomer must trail along at the

very end of theseries,

after the three Ionicsymbols

4, X, 4',which are already present in our earliest inscriptions.

In the famous Abu-Simbel graffiti of the Greek mercenariesof Psammetichus II we possess a dated document of 589 B. C.which I venture to reproduce once again in Figure 1, since allof its epigraphic content is seldom squeezedout of it. The datewas finally fixed by the discovery of the sarcophagus of Pedi-samtawi (the "Potasimto" of line 4) with the pertinentinformation that he was a leader of mercenaries for the

second,not the first, Psammetichus.6 Although there are among thewriters of these inscriptions natives of such purely Ionic citiesas Teos and Colophon, and though the author of the chiefmemorial also employs the Ionic script, there is no use of Q.We can only conclude that a separate symbol for long 0 was notin current use in 589 B. C.

But the inscribed potsherds from Naucratis show abundant

4 Herodotus, II, 182; III, 39; etc. The Thales, son of Orion (Brit.Mus. Cat. Sc., I, 1, B 281) can hardly be the famous philosopher, sincethe latter is called son of Examyas by Diogenes Laertius.

6 Cf. the study of this problem in Ath. Mitt., XXXI (1906), pp. 154 ff.by Curtius who, with the somewhat less extensive material then avail.able, reached much the same conclusion for the date.

6M. N. Tod, A Selection of Greek Historical Inscriptions, No. 4.

294




use of the new symbol. Here it seems to have escaped even the

archaeologists that the most important collection of these Nau-cratite inscriptions can be dated to a perfectly definite span of

years. Herodotus writes:

Amasis gave to the Greekswho arrived in Egypt the town ofNaucratis to inhabit, while to those who did not choose to livethere but to carry on oversea trade he gave locations for settingup altars and precincts to the gods. .. . And the Aeginetans

B5AVTNoSNeo5MToo\40A1PNT

IYAMA/'i)at^9TnErl) ?N* ASi^^?WTIXolT?wDoArlNtaON" 04 K10k0yrLP EIVI ?TAM?ftN.1 \hor osooS+ E noroTA IMTTO irvT oS ^5S

[rSs\o v JSo,,

P$.N Ao18 Bl0V oNoW O ) u

r hgr l"tQQ fc\ON/lot

Fig. 1. Inscriptions at Abu-Simbel (from Roehl's Imagines).

founded one of their own apart, a precinct of Zeus, and theSamians another one, of Hera, and the Milesians one of Apollo(II, 178).

In the days when it was still fashionable to be wiser than oursources, it was repeatedly pointed out that excavation hadestablished that the Greek settlement dated back to the reign ofPsammetichus I (651-610 B. C.), that the foundation date couldnot be later than 625 B. C., and that Herodotus must accordinglyhave been wrong in crediting its foundation to Amasis (570-526B. C.). Yet the obvious truth of the matter is that Herodotus

295



RHYS CARPENTER.

doesnot say that Naucratis was founded by Amasis, but that this

kingsettled certain Greeks there and

gaveothers the

necessaryground for constructing sanctuaries. The Milesians dedicatedtheir precinct to Apollo; and this very plot of ground was found,excavated, and indisputably identified by Flinders Petrie in1884.7 Within the precinct there were scattered remains of thearchitecture of two successive temples, and a trench was uncov-ered yielding masses of brokenvases with dedicatoryinscriptionsto the Milesian Apollo. The technique of archaeological dis-

coverywas at that time in the

making.Hence

Petrie,and after

him E. A. Gardner, could come to the conclusion that the first

temple dated from the seventh century B. C., the second was

contemporarywith the Erechtheum at Athens and hence fromthe end of the fifth century B. C., while the vases in the trenchformed a stratified deposit in precise and datable sequence. Allthree of these conclusions were erroneous.

The first temple actually dates 8 from the early years ofAmasis'

reign (i. e.,570-560

B.C.),the second

templedates9

just after the Persian occupation of Egypt (i. e., 520-510 B. C.),and the contents of the trench are a miscellaneous dump ofdiscarded dedications all thrown in and buried at one time.'0The earlier temple therefore exactly confirms Herodotus, who inturn makes it very unlikely that there was any Apollo precinctand hence any buriable dedication earlier than 569 B. C. Thedate of the second temple shows that it was the Persians who

destroyed the first temple,-as of course they would havedone,since the Greekshad come into Egypt both as traders dependent

on Egyptian protection and as mercenariespaid for keeping thearmed foreigner out of the country and so must have espousedthe native cause against the Persian.11 The situation at Nau-cratis is precisely parallel to that at Athens fifty years later,when the Persians sacked the Acropolis and the Athenians

returning thereafter gave their ruined dedications pious burial

7Egypt Exploration Fund, Third Memoir = Naukratis: Part I.s Brit. Mus. Cat. Sc., I, 1 (Pryce), p. 171.

'Ibid., p. 176, with the reference to Dinsmoor's original observationof the true date.

10It is impossible to imagine how a stratified trenchful of dedicationscould have formed in front of a temple.

11As Herodotus expressly says,-ol e7rKovpol oi roV Alyv7Triov (so.

Amasis) 6ovres dav8pes EXXJ\vese Kai'Kapes (III, 11).

296




within the precinct where they had originally been offered. The

pottery trench in Apollo's precinct at Naucratis is therefore"Perserschutt" (to use the argot of the profession). Its con-tents were all dedicated between 569 and 525 B.C. and allburied in haphazard confusion about 520 B. C. when the Greeksof Egypt had made their peace with the Persian conquerorandwere permitted to rebuild and reinhabit Naucratis. Thus the

Apollo dedications all fall within a period of 44 years, and thenumerical majority of them should belong to the third quarterof the sixth

century. The epigraphic importance of such aclosed and dated deposit is obvious.What evidence accrues for H and Q? In these inscriptions

the open form H almost completely displaces the older closed

form; and this fact alone dates the trench, if any still be

skeptical. Only once or twice is "0" written for the longvowel; elsewhere Q is consistently employed. The inference isunavoidable that if Q is unknown among the Ionic mercenariesof

Egyptin 589 B. C.

(teste Abu-Simbel), while on the contrarythe older usage of "0" for Q is all but unknown among theIonic traders of Egypt between 569 and 525 B. C. (teste theApollo trench at Naucratis), the Ionians in Egypt began usingthe new symbol during the second quarterof the century. It canhardly, therefore, have been invented in the Ionian mother-

country much before 575 B. C. The introduction of the newsymbol thus coincides almost exactly with the change in formfrom the closed to the

open eta, thoughthe occurrence

ofB

and Q in the same inscription 12 shows that a slight prioritybelongs to the omega.

We must conclude that any Asiatic Ionic manuscript laterthan the first quarter of the sixth century B. C. will employ thenew symbol, Q.

Elsewhere in the Greekworld the use of Q, like the use of Hfor long E, came only gradually into general favor and universalpractice. Thus at Athens H and n are

battlingstill with E

and 0 on inscriptions as late as the very last decade of the fifthcentury B. C. and are utterly unknown and foreign before thePersian Wars.

12E. g., Brit. Mus Cat. Sc., I, 1: B 281; Roehl, Inscr. Graec. Anti-quiss., nos. 483 and 486.

297



RHYS CARPENTER.

Before tracing the literary implications of these observations

I wish to revert to the Abu-Simbel inscriptions for some furtherinformation on early writing.The third graffito in the series (Figure 1) can only be

transliterated:

T?JyAXe0o'' 'ypae? o 'IaAro . . .

even though this reading leads to the strange assumption thatthe soldier Telephos used one and the same symbol for L andfor G and another symbol (8) indifferently for long E and for

II. Such a state of affairs is possible only where a script hasbeen hybridised. No alphabet would deliberately start out witha pair of indistinguishable symbols for unrelated sounds. In

Athens, in the fifth century, precisely the same confusion

reigned. If we find the symbol A in an Attic inscription ofthat period we must look at once whether we find I or F

elsewhere in the writing. If L exists, A must be read " G";while if r exists, A must be read "L". The former follows

the old native Attic, the latter the imported Ionic tradition.Both cannot co-exist for long: the newcomer must oust hisrival or himself succumb. Similarly at Athens H may representthe aspirate or it may represent 7; that it should representboth or either of these indiscriminately would be an unen-

durable and therefore unenduring condition. This parallel will

give us the clue to the trouble besetting Telephos the Ialysianat Abu-Simbel. Obviously the use of E as D is in the Ionic

tradition; hence B for "h" must be the older native Rhodianusage, just as A for G is attested in Ionic while the same

sign is used for L in old-Rhodian,as inscriptions prove.13 Thereis then no puzzle here.

But philologists have been badly puzzled by a phenomenonoccurring in another of the Abu-Simbel graffiti (not shown in

Figure 1), where some speaker of Doric has unmistakablywritten HEAau where grammar and phonology demand jhaaw

(rov oTprpaTov). Similarly HEt has turned up for jdL, "I am,"on a grave inscription in Thera.14 There is only one reasonableor even possible explanation of this phenomenon; yet I am notaware that it has been given, though Gustav Meyer in his

13Att. Mitt., XVI (1891), p. 113; Roehl, I. G. A., no. 473.14 I. G., XII, 3, no. 769: Appwvosregi.

298




Griechische Grammatik (3rd ed., ? 4862) correctly saw that thecombination

HE must somehow be read as v. His advice hasbeen little heeded by epigraphists.A Rhodian or Theran or any other Greek whose alphabet was

passing through a period of Ionicisation could scarcely fail tobe restive under the awkward ambiguity involving such crucialletters as H and E. The Rhodian could perhaps do nothing toindicate whether he meant L or G when he wrote A/; but hecould do something to show whether B was to be read as H oras E: if he meant it for E he could

appendan " E " after

thesymbol,-a sort of determinative to fix it in its novel vocalicinstead of traditional aspirate function. Hence BE is to beread " i. e. r." B EXace s therefore not Acacreor 7XeAcAror

yet 7Xaaoe,but just what it ought to be, ;Xaae. And 83EuLs not

EL nor 'tu nor yet Ut, but just plain ,t, "I am." The

philologist may rest in peace; the epigraphist should neverhave broken so rudely on his musings.

This hasadmittedly

been adigression.

But it is intended toshow that the classical scholar may come to some very curiousconclusions if his epigraphical knowledge or assistance be faulty.And so it is with the main subject of this paper, the use of Eand 0 in Ionic; for even the great Wilamowitz could write 15

with that note of half-stifled fury and superior scorn which were

typical of the times quite as much as the man:

Denn die Mehrdeutigkeit der Zeichen E und 0, die fur das

Ionische genau so gilt wie fur das Attische (was die IUnbelehr-barenfreilich immer noch nicht wissen, die bei solchenVariantenim Homertexte fortfahren von Atticismen zu faseln), ....

I can only bow humbly to the storm and admit my Unbelehr-barkeit. I believe that it is now self-evident that there musthave been an -} in Ionic from the start and certain that therewas an o from about 575 B. C. Even those who do not yet seefit to agree that there was no alphabet at all in Ionia before

725 B. C., no extensive use of writing before 650 B. C., and noadequate supply of paper and ink, and hence no books, beforethe sixth century,16-even these must make allowance for the

15Sappho und Simonides, p. 84.

21So Th. Birt, Abriss des antiken Buchwesens, in Muller's Handbuchd. klass. Altertumswissenschaft, I, 3 (1913), p. 277: "Das 6. Jht. hat

299



RHYS CARPENTER.

history of these two symbols. We must all say that if our

current text of Homer showsmisunderstandingsand misspellingswhich are rooted in the ambiguity of o, ov, and o, these mistakes,in orderto be of Ionian origin, must antedate the year 570 B. C.;whereas if there are other mistakes rooted in the ambiguity ofc, et, and v, these cannot be based on an Asiatic Ionic text at all.

It is well known that the ancient editors and commentators ofHomer thought that they had detected such mistakes in thetraditional text and thought that they knew the reason fortheir

occurrence, giving almost precisely the same explanationwhich has just been offered. They blamed the errors on the

xerwayp;a,aLievot, the scribes who wrongly transliterated their O'sand E's because they were copying from a text which made nodistinction between o, ov, and o on the one hand and E,a, and 'qon the other. The following table exhibits typical instances ofthe various " metagraphic" mistakes which ancient or modernscholars have claimed to have detected:

Type of Ionic (oral) first written later copied intoerror: tradition: down as: our texts as:

?t foro B'PTO cteto

? o Locrea H-f v^ej Puer lit

Ky7o6V0S r"*t ! HAu6L for V

^KVu/Evos A^|VI %Or Seirv AfrtVos

et for ve /r IO/ A O .

1) for ?e ove (P)oi

o IVrHoIov

i/y o?ov for C WY dS o0 , O ouy oVs

ou for oVo,ros v0o50 YVoUro.s

Ofor ov H4deaou<6r'^A1tO*OIA I4?o6Poy

If all of these, or some of these,-or even none of these, butother errors like them,-prove to be valid, then the manuscriptfrom which our current text of Homer was

ultimatelyderived

was not written in Ionia. Furthermore, an Asiatic Ionic text,whether of Chios or Miletus or Smyrna or Clazomenae,wouldhave to be unaspirated, whereas our current text is full of

aspiration in conformity with Attic usage.

also eigentlich erst eine Litteratur in Buchform gebracht." Cf. p. 245:" Homers Epen sind noch ohne Buch und ohne Schrift entstanden."

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EARLY IONIAN WRITING. 301

It is obvious whither these observations must tend-to a

categorical defense and unescapable acceptance of the ancienttradition that the orally transmitted text of Homer was first

reduced to writing in Athens in the sixth century B. C. But I

do not wish to argue that matter here, being content to have

shown that E and O may be fundamental factors for EarlyIonian literature and that the facts about them have to be

understood. It is the scholar who merely brushes such thingsaside who is truly unbelehrbar.

RHYS CARPENTER.BRYN MAWR COLLEGE.

Documents

Carpenter, Rhys_Early Ionian Writing_1935_AJPh, 56, 4, Pp. 291-301