Robert Parker - The Early Greek Alphabets: Origin, Diffusion, Uses

This volume has its origin in a conference held in Oxford in 2016, 'Archaia Grammata. The Local scripts of Archaic Greece. A conference in memory of L. H. Jeffery (1915-1986)'. The idea of commemorating Anne Jeffery, 40 years after her death, was suggested by Angelos Matthaiou. The location, Oxford, was the natural one, as this was where Jeffery completed her doctorate and taught, a much-loved figure, throughout her career. (As an undergraduate she studied in Cambridge, and had begun doctoral work there, interrupted by war work.)) to two refugees from an earlier Oxford conference on the development of the Greek alphabet that never proceeded to publication.

Charles Crowther played a central role in planning and organizing the conference. Robert Parker acknowledges with gratitude a generous grant from the Ludwig fund of New College that covered conference expenses. Philippa Steele conducted her editorial work on this volume in her role as director of the project Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing Systems (CREWS) at Cambridge University, which has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 677758). We thank Kim Richardson for her careful copy-editing, and at the OUP especially Karen Raith, Henry Clarke and Kalpana Sagayanathan.

Introduction
Robert Parker and Philippa M. Steele

The Genesis of the Local Alphabets of Archaic Greece
Rudolf Wachter

Sounds, Signs, and Boundaries: Perspectives on Early Greek Alphabetic Writing
Nino Luraghi

Writing and Pre-Writing in Early Archaic Methone and Eretria
Rosalind Thomas

Contextualizing the Origin of the Greek Alphabet
Roger D. Woodard

Dodona and the Concept of Local Scripts
Alan Johnston

The Pronunciation of Upsilon and Related Matters: A U-Turn
Julin Mndez Dosuna

Letter Forms and Distinctive Spellings: Date and Context of the 'New Festival Calendar from Arkadia'
Sophie Minon

Local Scripts on Archaic Coins: Distribution and Function
Andrew Meadows

Regions within Regions: Patterns of Epigraphic Habits within Archaic Crete
James Whitley

New Archaic Inscriptions: Attica, the AtticIonic Islands of the Cyclades, and the Doric Islands
Angelos P. Matthaiou

Boiotian Inscriptions in Epichoric Script: A Conspectus of Recent Discoveries
Nikolaos Papazarkadas

Etruria between the Iron Age and Orientalizing Period and the Adoption of Alphabetic Writing
Enrico Benelli and Alessandro Naso

The Greek Alphabet in South-East Italy: Literacy and the Culture of Writing between Greeks and Non-Greeks
Kathryn Lomas