Origins of Greek

Peter James and his colleagues dispute the existence of a three-century dark age in ancient history. They find it implausible to think that civilization died in the 12th or 11th century, and then revived, almost intact, three centuries later. Language provides one example of the difficulties of explaining continuity over this period:

“early ‘11 ^th -centry’ Levantine forms apparently served as the prototypes for the 8 ^th -century Greek alphabet. The detailed arguments have been forcefully presented by Joseph Naveh, a leading Semitic palaeographer. The earliest Greek writing closely resembles examples from Syro-Palestine conventionally dated to c. 1050 BC, not only in the shapes of letters, but also in the direction of writing and the use of word-dividers.” How did the Greeks pick up a style of writing that was 200 years old, and supposedly forgotten, at the time they picked it up?

James also draws this intriguing conclusion: “instead of the traditional idea of the Greek alphabet being borrowed from that of the Phoenicians, both would have developed from a common parent script, termed ‘Proto-Canaanite.’”