Greek alphabet history runs from borrowed Phoenician signs to the 24 letters still written across Greece. Small-group trips with a host travel through mainland Greece and its seas of islands. The sections trace the Phoenician roots of the script to the local alphabets of Crete, Corinth and Athens. Later sections cover the Lemnos stele, the lost letter digamma and four short answers. Related pages cover Greek phrases for travellers, Museums in Greece and ancient Greek sites. More trip ideas sit on the page about Greece tours.
Bookings made through the GetYourGuide widgets on this page earn Classical Greece Tours a commission, at no extra cost to the traveller.
What is the Greek alphabet?
The Greek alphabet began as a borrowed set of 22 Phoenician letters. Greek writers kept all of them at first. Five of those signs then took new work as vowels. Vowels are open sounds like a or o.
The Greek alphabet also gained three new consonant letters, named phi, chi and psi. These served its aspirated sounds and its consonant clusters. An aspirated sound is spoken with a strong puff of breath. A cluster is a pair of consonants spoken together, such as ps. The Phoenician source, called ‘Phoenician letters’ by Greeks, held consonants only.
Ancient scribes wrote the Greek alphabet in two distinct hands. Uncial writing, kept for literary and religious books, had neat and rounded block letters. Cursive writing, a quicker joined hand, served everyday purposes. Later, Renaissance printers in the West turned minuscule, or small, letter forms into lowercase type. The Renaissance was the revival of classical learning.
The Greek alphabet also labels the night sky. Its letters tag the brighter stars in every one of the eighty-eight constellations. A constellation is a named pattern of stars seen from Earth. In Centaurus, the brightest star is known as Alpha Centauri. For historical reasons, the lettering in a handful of constellations starts with a lower ranked letter.
- Storms: Greek letters named North Atlantic hurricanes in 2005 and 2020, once the regular list ran out.
- Phonetics: Beta, theta and chi serve as Greek characters in digital texts of the International Phonetic Alphabet.
- Coptic: The Coptic alphabet of Egypt adds eight letters, drawn from Demotic, to its Greek base.
The Greek alphabet also lies behind two Slavic scripts. The Glagolitic alphabet grew mainly from Greek minuscule for Old Church Slavonic. The Cyrillic script came later, in the First Bulgarian Empire, from the Greek uncial capitals. Cyrillic soon took the place of Glagolitic.
How did Phoenician letters become the Greek alphabet?
The Greek alphabet came from one Greek who knew the Phoenician script at first hand. The leading view among specialists dates the borrowing to the early 8th century BC. Euboea, a large Greek island, is named as one possible birthplace.
The earliest known fragments of Greek inscriptions date from 770 to 750 BC. Their letter shapes match Phoenician forms of about 800 to 750 BC. An inscription is writing cut or painted on a hard surface. The Fayum alphabet of Cyprus is dated to about 800 BC. It appears to keep the oldest known form of the Greek alphabet.
After the Greek alphabet took root on the mainland, it travelled east to Phrygia. People there devised a similar script of their own. Another theory places the first adaptation on the island of Thera. Herodotus and Pausanias wrote that Phoenicians from the line of Cadmus settled Thera early. Archaeology has not proven such a Phoenician presence.
Herodotus saw inscribed cauldrons in the Theban temple of Ismenian Apollo. He called the letters Cadmean and judged them close to the Ionian Greek alphabet. One tripod said Amphitryon had dedicated it from spoils taken from the Teleboae. Herodotus also noted that Ionians called papyrus ‘skins’, since goat and sheep skins once carried writing.
- Fates: Hyginus told that the three Fates made the first five vowels, plus the letters B and T.
- Cranes: In the same tale, Hermes drew the letters as wedges, since flying cranes form a wedge.
- Diodorus: The historian Diodorus Siculus held that the Phoenicians only changed the form of older letters.
The Greek alphabet also features in a royal tale. Tradition says a daughter of Agamemnon, king of Aeolian Cyme, married the Phrygian king Midas. That bond possibly helped Greeks borrow letters from the Phrygians. Phrygian letter shapes stand closest to the inscriptions of Aeolis.
Which local scripts came before the standard Greek alphabet?
The Greek alphabet once existed as a set of local scripts, called epichoric alphabets. These differed from city to city. In 1867 Adolf Kirchhoff sorted them into four types. His colour-coded map gave them the labels green, red, light blue and dark blue.
The green type of the Greek alphabet is the oldest and stays closest to the Phoenician letters. It used no extra letters beyond the Phoenician set. It appears in Crete and on southern Aegean islands such as Thera, Melos and Anaphe. The red type spread across Thessaly, Boeotia, large parts of the Peloponnese and the island of Euboea.
The red type later passed to the West, where it grew into the parent of the Latin alphabet. Athens used the light blue type until 403 BC, as did a group of Aegean islands. The dark blue type held every consonant letter of today’s Greek alphabet. Corinth and Argos, in the north-east Peloponnese, wrote in this form.
The letter omega arose before 600 BC among the Ionian cities of Asia Minor. Its makers broke open the closed circle of omicron. Koppa, an early letter for a k sound before o and u, faded from the mid-6th century BC. Corinth, Argos, Crete and Rhodes still wrote it into the 5th century BC.
- San: The M-shaped letter san stood for s, and Argos used it until the late 6th century.
- Sicyon: The city of Sicyon kept san on its coins as a civic emblem.
- Boeotia: Thespiae used a special Boeotian letter for e, known only from grave stones dated 424 BC.
The 24-letter Greek alphabet used today began as the regional script of the Ionian cities in Anatolia. By the mid-4th century BC, the wider Greek world had taken it up. That Ionian form then replaced the older local scripts.
Why does the Lemnos stele matter to the Greek alphabet?
The Greek alphabet, in an archaic form, covers the Lemnos stele. This funeral stone comes from the island of Lemnos. Experts still debate where this version of the script came from. Athens now keeps the stone in its National Archaeological Museum.
Builders had set the stone into a church wall in Kaminia, where it was found. Its face shows a male soldier, carved as a bust in low relief. Low relief is carving that stands only slightly out from a flat surface. The Lemnian language, the tongue of the text, is known mainly from this one inscription.
The Greek alphabet on the stele spells out 198 characters, which make 33 to 40 words. One to three dots sometimes separate one word from the next. The lines run boustrophedon, with each new line reversing direction. Scholars transliterated the text, copying it letter by letter into another script. Translation came later, through comparison with Etruscan.
Its 6th-century date rests on an event of 510 BC, when Miltiades of Athens invaded Lemnos. Kirchhoff once tied the script to the western red type of Greek alphabet. That idea clashed with geography, since blue alphabet lands surrounded Lemnos. A newer view sees the alphabet of Samothrace as the main model.
- Corpus: The Lemnian corpus, or body of texts, counts sixteen inscriptions, chiefly single words on pots.
- Chloi: Ten of those texts were found at Chloi, in a sanctuary of the Cabeiri.
- Phocaea: Jacques Heurgon read the stone as honouring Holaies, a settler from Phocaea after its siege of 545 BC.
A second Lemnian stone uses the same back-and-forth layout of the Greek alphabet. Excavators found it at Hephaistia, on a dedication base near the Hellenistic theatre. Its 26 letters run in two lines of boustrophedon script. Hellenistic describes the age after Alexander the Great.
What became of digamma, a lost letter of the Greek alphabet?
The Greek alphabet once held digamma, also called wau, an archaic letter for the sound w. Spoken Greek lost that sound, yet the letter lived on in another job. It still serves as a Greek numeral for the number six.
Digamma stood sixth in the early Greek alphabet, between epsilon and zeta. Like its Phoenician model, waw, it stood for a w sound. Waw itself was shaped roughly like a Y. The vowel upsilon also grew from waw, yet it took a place near the end of the row. The Latin letter F descends from digamma.
The w sound left clear traces. The Hittite name for Troy, Wilusa, matches an early Greek form, Wilion. The Greek word for wine, oinos, was once woinos with a digamma. Latin vinum, the source of the English word wine, is a related form. Aeolian Greek held on to the w sound longer than any other dialect.
Words borrowed before the w faded lost the sound along with Greek. Oscan Viteliu, meaning land of the male calves, became the Greek word Italia. Within the Greek alphabet, the numeral still marks book chapters. It also appears in the numbers after monarchs’ names. In practice, the letter pair sigma-tau is far more common.
- Stigma: The numeral form is now called stigma, after a Byzantine ligature, or joined pair, of sigma and tau.
- Inscriptions: As a letter of the Greek alphabet, digamma appears in archaic and dialect inscriptions until the classical period.
- Homer: In Ionic Greek, the w sound seems to have gone before Homer’s epics were written down.
The Greek alphabet of early Crete kept a digamma close to the Phoenician original. One Cretan variant had its stem bent sideways. In Athens, by contrast, both classical digamma shapes were avoided as numerals. Other signs for six took their place there.
What do travellers ask about Greek alphabet, and what are the answers?
Greek alphabet spelling grew simpler in 1982. In that year the Greek state adopted the monotonic system for official use. Monotonic means a single accent mark. The older polytonic system, with its range of marks, still serves for writing Ancient Greek.
In the Greek alphabet, what does boustrophedon mean?
Boustrophedon is a way of writing in which every second line runs the other way. The letters on those lines are mirrored too. The Greek name likens this to an ox turning as it ploughs a field. Greek writers used it on stone, though it lost favour through the Hellenistic period.
Who gave the Greek alphabet its accent marks?
The scholar Aristophanes of Byzantium first developed the Greek accent system. He worked at the Musaeum, a centre of learning, in Alexandria. The marks helped readers pronounce Greek in older literary works. His mid-level dot after a short passage was called a komma. It gave the modern comma its origin and name.
When did Athens adopt the 24-letter Greek alphabet?
Athens made the switch in about 403 BC. The archon Eucleides, a chief magistrate, proposed it. The Assembly then dropped the Old Attic letters for the Ionian set. The politician Archinus is also said to have backed the change. The standard Greek alphabet is therefore sometimes called the Eucleidean alphabet.
Which letter of the Greek alphabet lives on as the numeral 900?
That letter is sampi, an archaic sign for a hissing sound in eastern Ionic speech. Its use there spans the 6th and 5th centuries BC. Later it lived on only as the numeral for 900. Its modern name, sampi, first meant ‘san pi’, or ‘like a pi’, and dates from medieval times.
Featured photo: Future Perfect at Sunrise, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.