Literacy, the Near East, and the Milesian Milieu

The Greek alphabet itself was adapted from the Phoenician consonantal script around the 9th–8th century BCE, with the decisive Greek innovation being the addition of dedicated vowel letters — a modification that made the script capable of representing the full sound-structure of spoken Greek far more precisely than its Semitic model. The earliest substantial alphabetic inscriptions, such as the so-called Nestor's Cup graffito from Pithekoussai (c. 740–700 BCE) and the Dipylon inscription from Athens (c. 740 BCE), are roughly contemporary with the traditional dating of Homer, yet widespread literacy remained, for centuries, the preserve of a minority — craftsmen, merchants, aristocrats, and eventually philosophers — with oral performance still the dominant mode of public communication. Written legal codes, such as those of Draco (c. 621 BCE) and Solon (c. 594 BCE) at Athens, gave an early model for fixed, citable, written authority that written philosophical doctrine would later follow. Only from around the 6th century BCE, as papyrus scrolls imported via Egypt and Phoenicia gave way to more widespread book production, did the circulation of Ionian prose treatises become possible.