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CHAPTER VIII
THE GREEK ALPHABET AND ITS OFFSHOOTS
THE GREEKS
The importance of the Greeks in the history of alphabetic writing is paramount. All the alphabets in use in Europe to-day stand in direct or indirect relation to the ancient Greek. Although the Greeks did not invent the alphabet, they improved it to such a degree that for three thousand years it has furnished a most convenient vehicle of expression for the thoughts and communication of men of all races, creeds and tongues.
In the second half of the second millennium B.C., a new ethnic element, that we know now as Greek, emerged into the light of history, and in the subsequent centuries nurtured one of the greatest civilizations ever produced; this became the foundation of our western art, philosophy and science.
Nothing is known about the cradle-land of the composite Greek people. It is generally accepted that they came from the north and arrived in waves, sweeping down upon the older pre-Hellenic civilization that had flourished in Crete, on the Aegean islands and on the Greek mainland (Part 1, Chapter III). Greek tradition tells of two main waves of invading Greeks. The first wave, generally described by the name "Achæan," came in the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries B.C. as the movement of bands who arrived in successive relays, and gradually established themselves in many parts of Greece. In the last decades of the thirteenth century we find them attacking Egypt. By 1200 B.C. they were the ruling people in Crete and in the chief principalities of the Peloponnesus and they were responsible for the sacking of Troy (1183 B.c.?).
The thirteenth and the twelfth centuries are called the "heroic age," this being the period of the action of the heroic poetry. In the main the coming of the Achæans seems to have been a relatively peaceful infiltration, Mycenae, which supplanted Cnossus as the chief focus of Egean culture, did not destroy the Minoan culture, although it completely overshadowed it.
The second great wave of invading Greeks, known as the Dorian invasion, brought on Greece a "dark age," such as that which came on Europe at the fall of the Roman Empire in the west. The Dorian invasion coincided with the end of the Bronze Age and of the Mycenæan civilization-dated about the end of the twelfth century B.C.-and with the beginning of the Iron Age.
The tribal movements caused by the Dorian invasions came to rest about 1000 B.C., but the period of disturbance and obscurity endured for some time. It was the lonians of the coastal cities of Asia Minor who first kindled the torch of Hellenism.
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Out of the troubled darkness, which shrouded the transition from the Bronze Age and the Mycenaean civilization to the Iron Age and the early Greek primitive geometric art of the tenth and ninth centuries B.c., there came the wonderful achievement of the invention of the Greek alphabet.
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