Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

Language, Alphabet, and Literacy 55
letters entered the Greek alphabet virtually unchanged, including
aleph (alpha) meaning “ox-head” and beth (beta) meaning “house.”
The same letters also functioned as a numerical system and were
used for musical notation.
The earliest surviving examples of the Greek alphabet are dated
around 740 b.c.e. Some scholars maintain that the Greeks first used
the alphabet for trade and commerce, others for preserving epic
poetry. The earliest examples of Greek writing are, in fact, lines written
in epic verse. Before long, however, letters had come to serve a
variety of purposes. Although some states had a few local variants,
the alphabet became standardized by the early fourth century b.c.e.
The Greek alphabet was destined to become the basis for other
European scripts, including Latin, modern Greek, and Cyrillic.
There is no aspirate or letter h in Greek; instead, h is indicated at
the beginning of a word by the sign `, as in the word “Adhj (Hades).
We call this a rough breathing. The absence of an h sound is indicated
by the sign ', as in the word 'Acillšuj (Achilleus). This is
called a smooth breathing.
Because Greek is an inflected language, the significance of each
word is determined not by its order in the sentence but by its ending.
One of the earliest known inscriptions written in
Greek. The lettering has been scratched on the
cup from right to left in the Phoenician manner.