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 from the very beginning of our records. Unfortunately, as yet no record is preserved which can with any probability be dated earlier than the 7th century, and the Phoenician influence had by then nearly ceased. How long this influence lasted we cannot tell. If in Crete a system of writing of an entirely different nature had been developed seven or eight centuries before, there must have been some very important reason for the entire abandonment of the old method and the adoption of a new. In Crete, at least, the excavations show that the old civilization must have ended in a social and political cataclysm. The magnificent palace of Minos—there seems no reason to withhold from it the name of the great prince whom Thucydides recognized as the first to hold the empire of the sea—perished by the flames, and it evidently had been plundered beforehand of everything that a conqueror would regard as valuable. The only force in Greek history which we know that could have produced this change was that of the Dorian conquest. As everywhere in the Peloponnese, except at Argos, there seems to have been a sudden break with the earlier civilization, which can have been occasioned only by the semi-barbarous Dorian tribes, so the same result seems to have followed from the same cause in Thera. The Dorians apparently were without an alphabet, and consequently when Phoenician traders and pirates occupied the place left vacant by the downfall of Minos’s empire, the people of the island, and of the sea coasts generally, adopted from them the Phoenician alphabet. The Greeks who migrated to Cyprus, possibly as the result of the Dorian invasion, adopted a syllabary, not an alphabet (see Plate; also .) That the alphabet was borrowed and adapted independently by different places not widely separated, and that the earliest Greek alphabets did not spread from one or a few centres in Greek lands, seem clear (a) from the different Greek sounds for which the Phoenician symbols were utilized; (b) from the different symbols which were employed to represent sounds which the Phoenicians did not possess, and for which, therefore, they had no symbols. The Phoenician alphabet was an alphabet of consonants only, but all Greek alphabets as yet known agree in employing as vowels. On the other hand, a table of Greek alphabets will show how widely divergent the symbols for the same sound were. Except for a single Attic inscription (see Plate), the alphabets of Thera and of Corinth are the oldest Greek alphabets which we possess. Yet at Corinth alongside 𐌄 𐌄 , which is found for the so-called spurious diphthong (i.e. the Attic, which does not represent an Indo-European , but arises by contraction, as in  , or through the lengthening of the vowel sound as the result of the loss of a consonant, as in  for  ) the short  sound is represented by ;  is found at Corinth in its oldest form , and also as , while in Thera it is. In Thera the w sound of digamma () was entirely lost, and therefore is not represented. Both Thera and Corinth employ in the earliest inscriptions for, not , though in both alphabets the ordinary use as  is adopted, no doubt through the influence of trade with other states. On the other hand. at Cleonae. which is distant not more than 8 or 9 m. from Corinth, an ancient inscription written  has recently been discovered, which shows that though Cleonae for B wrote, like the Corinthian , and, as at Corinth, wrote 𐌁 for a vowel sound, the vowel thus represented was not short and long e ( and ) as at Corinth, but only, as in 𐌗𐌓𐌁𐌌𐌀, 𐌌𐌁 ( ). Here 𐌄  represents, and the spurious diphthong is represented by , as in 𐌄𐌉𐌌𐌄𐌍  ( , Doric infinitive =  ), a form which shows that has at Cleonae the more modern form 𐌉 as distinguished from the Corinthian.

Regarding three other questions controversy still rages. These are: (a) how Greek utilized the four sibilants (Shin, Samech, Zain and Zade), which it rook over from the Phoenician; (b) what was the history of development in the symbols for (the history of  belongs to both heads); (c) the history of the symbol for the digamma .

In the Phoenician alphabet Zain was the seventh letter, occupying the same position and having the same form approximately (𐤆) as the early Greek, while in pronunciation it was a voiced s-sound; Samech (𐤎‎) followed the symbol for n and was the ordinary s-sound, though, as we have seen, it is in different Greek slates at the earliest period as well as ; after the symbol for p came Ẓade (𐤑‎), which was a strong palatal s, though in name it corresponds to the Greek  ; while lastly Shin (𐤔‎) follows the symbol for r, and was an sh-sound. The Greek name for the sibilant ( ) may simply mean the hissing letter and be a derivative from  ; many authorities, however, hold that it is a corruption of the Phoenician Samech. Unfortunately, it is not clear how many sibilants ere distinguished in Greek pronunciation, nor over what areas a particular pronunciation extended. There is, however, considerable evidence of the view that Greek representing the sound arising from, , ,  was pronounced as sh (ṣ), while  representing gy, dy was pronounced in some districts zh (ẓ).

On an inscription of Halicarnassus, a town which stood in ancient Carian territory, the sound of in  is represented by, as it is also in the Carian name Panyassis ( , genitive), though the ordinary  is also found in the same inscription. The same variation occurs at the neighbouring Teos and at Ephesus, while the coins of Mesembria in Thrace show regularly and, where  represents the sound which resulted from the fusion of , and which appears in Homer as  in <span title=méssos> , while in later Greek it becomes <span title=mésos>. This symbol is in all probability the early form of the letter which was known to the Greeks as San (<span title=sán> ) and in modern times as Sampi, and which is utilized as the numeral for 900 in the shape. According to Herodotus (i. 139), San was only the Dorian name for the letter which the Ionians called Sigma. This would bring it into connexion with the Phoenician 𐤔 (Shin), which, turned through a right angle, is possibly the Greek, though some forms of Ẓade on old Hebrew coins and gems equally resemble the Greek letter. From other forms of Sade, however, the other early form of, viz. , is probably derived. The confusion is thus extreme: the name Ẓade assimilated in Greek to the names <span title=ē̂ta> and <span title=thē̂ta> becomes <span title=zē̂ta>, though the form is that of Zain; the name of Samech is possibly the origin of Sigma, while the form of Samech is that of which has not taken over a Phoenician name. It is probable that the form is an abbreviation in writing from right to left of the earlier , and  of the four stroke. That the confusion of the sibilants was not confined to the Greeks only, but that pronunciation varied within a small area even among the Semitic stock, is shown by the difficulty which the Ephraimites found in pronouncing “shibboleth” (Judges xii. 6).

For the history of the additional symbols which are not Phoenician, we must begin with. There is no Greek alphabet in which the symbol is not represented. But the Phoenician form corresponding to it is the consonant w, and occupies the position of the Greek digamma as sixth in the series. Whence did the Greeks obtain the digamma? The point is not clear, but probably the Greeks acted here as they did in the case of the vowel i and the consonant y, adopting the consonant symbol for the vowel sound. As, however, except in Cyprus, Pamphylia and Argos, the only y sound which survived in