Table of Contents

Acknowledgements Abbreviations 1. Introduction: Issues in studying early alphabets Philip J. Boyes and Philippa M. Steele 2. A ʽtop-downʼ re-invention of an old form: Cuneiform alphabets in context Silvia Ferrara 3. Variation in alphabetic cuneiform: Rethinking the ‘Phoenician’ inscription from Sarepta Philip J. Boyes 4. Ancient Egypt and the earliest known stages of alphabetic writing Ben Haring 5. Much ado about an implement! – the Phoenicianising of Early Alphabetic Reinhard G. Lehmann 6. Vowel representation in the Archaic Greek and Old Aramaic scripts: A comparative orthographic and phonological examination Roger D. Woodard 7. Mother or sister? Rethinking the origins of the Greek alphabet and its relation to the other ‘western’ alphabets Willemijn Waal 8. The development of Greek alphabets: Fluctuations and standardisations Philippa M. Steele 9. Between scripts and languages: Inscribed intricacies from geometric and archaic Greek contexts Giorgos Bourogiannis 10. The matter of voice – the Umbrian perspective Karin W. Tikkanen 11. Writings in network? The case of Palaeohispanic scripts Coline Ruiz Darasse Bibliography

About the Author

Philip Boyes is a research associate at the Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge. As part of the CREWS Project, he works on the social context of writing at Late Bronze Age Ugarit. He has previously worked on the archaeology of the East Mediterranean and Levant in the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages. Philippa M. Steele is the Director of the CREWS Project, a Senior Research Associate at the Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge, and a Senior Research Fellow of Magdalene College. She has previously been awarded a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship and the Evans Pritchard Lectureship at All Souls College, Oxford, followed by a European Research Council grant to run the CREWS Project, and has published widely on ancient languages and writing systems with a particular focus on Cyprus and the Aegean.

Reviews

"[The book] ranges expertly and thought-provokingly..."-- "Current World Archaeology"