not least its poetry.” My hypothesis, which I am entirely unable to support other than by deductive evidence, is that the adoption of the Phoenician alphabet had a dramatic effect on the way in which written language was used and the proliferation of its use within the population. Chadwick hints at the impact of the change when he says that this “writing changed much of the Greek way of life. What is arguably more interesting in this academic saga, at least to me, is the cultural watershed created by the transition of Greek civilisation out of Linear B and similar scripts into an alphabetised system. Chadwick’s book is an homage to the young philologist who had the insight and professional skill to connect the linguistic dots which proved that Linear B was a form of Greek. However until the mid-20th century, the fact that Linear B was a representation of Greek wasn’t even guessed at. The Mycenaeans were in turn the successors to the Minoan culture, the first identifiable European civilisation, and adapted the Minoan writing system for use in primitive Greek. It was used in the Mycenaean civilisation in the late Bronze Age, perhaps as early as 1600 BCE.
Linear B is one of the predecessor written languages to Homeric Greek. And the first things written about in the new script were the legends that had been passed down verbally in the form of song. The 8th century breakthrough was the transformation of the Greek written language from one used for public administration, accounting, military reporting, and royal histories to one of everyday affairs. Writing itself in one of its various forms - pictographic, syllabic and alphabetic - had existed for several millennia before that point, but not really a literature.
It shifted an entire culture from one grounded on anonymous bardic legends to one of cosmic story-telling, led of course by the great Homer.
It is arguably this act that promoted the creation of European literature. It was the adoption of the Phoenician alphabet, from which all other alphabets are derived. No, it wasn’t the mere matter of the first Olympic Games - although that may be connected. Arguably the most important cultural event of European history took place then somewhere in the Greek peninsula. The world changed decisively in or around 776 BCE.
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