Roger D. Woodard - The Textualization of the Greek Alphabet

In this book, Roger D. Woodard argues that when the Greeks first began to use the alphabet, they viewed themselves as participants in a performance phenomenon conceptually modeled on the performances of the oral poets. Since a time older than Greek antiquity, the oral poets of Indo-European tradition had been called weavers of words their extemporaneous performance of poetry was word weaving. With the arrival of the new technology of the alphabet and the onset of Greek literacy, the very act of producing written symbols was interpreted as a comparable performance activity, albeit one in which almost everyone could participate, not only the select few. It was this new conceptualization of and participation in performance activity by the masses that eventually, or perhaps quickly, resulted in the demise of oral composition in performance in Greece. In conjunction with this investigation, Woodard analyzes a set of copper plaques inscribed with repeated alphabetic series and a line of what he interprets to be text, which attests to this archaic Greek conceptualization of the performance of symbol crafting.

ROGER D. WOODARD is Andrew van Vranken Raymond Professor of Classics and Professor of Linguistics at the University of Buffalo (The State University of New York). His visiting positions have included appointments at the American Academy in Rome, Oxford University, the Centro di Antropologia e Mondo Antico dellUniversit di Siena, the Max-Planck-Institut fr Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Berlin, and the Max-Planck-Institut fr evolutionre Anthropologie in Leipzig. He is author or editor of many books, including Myth, Ritual, and the Warrior in Roman and Indo-European Antiquity ; The Cambridge Companion to Greek Mythology ; Indo-European Sacred Space: Vedic and Roman Cult ; Indo-European Myth and Religion: A Manual ; Ovid: Fasti (with A. J. Boyle); The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Worlds Ancient Languages ; Greek Writing from Knossos to Homer: A Linguistic Interpretation of the Origin of the Greek Alphabet and the Continuity of Ancient Greek Literacy ; and On Interpreting Morphological Change: The Greek Reflexive Pronoun .

The story goes that Homer died when fisher boys on Ios posed him a riddle that he could not unknot. Something like this: Those we caught we left behind; those we did not catch we brought back with us. What is it? It was no fish, as Homer seemed to imagine, but lice. And they say that this cleverly woven web its creation inspired by the very Muses proved to be Homers undoing when he could not tease apart its fibers.

But I think not. It was no weaving of a riddle that was Homers bane but the weaving of the alphabet when the Muses began to show their favors far and wide to practically anyone who could scratch out its symbols not just to some boys on Ios. It was a woven viral hexameter that did him in.

There are many indications of this, not least of which is the great variability of letter shapes that were employed in early Greek inscriptional writing, within individual inscriptions, producing variegated graphemic patterns text, literally. This variability has long been noticed. The prominence of the back-and-forth twining lines of boustrophedon is another indication. But the triad of copper plaques with which this study begins and that provides a continuous thread passing through the narrative of this work, I will argue, drags this metaphoric weaving out and lays it before us, making it unmistakably recognizable, gathering our attention to the alphabetic fabric that might have otherwise escaped our attention.

A word about that. While (1) the set of copper plaques etched with abecedarium after abecedarium and (2) the concept of the weaving of alphabetic strands are interlinked in this work, each is a distinct phenomenon. The investigation of each of the two constitutes a separate study. Each forms the centerpiece of a separate thesis. One thesis does not depend on the other, but one informs the other. One thesis concerns the interpretation of a particularly unique set of documents; the other thesis addresses the earliest Greek conceptualizations of alphabetic writing. The thoughtful reader is asked to evaluate them separately.

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