Greece Gets an Alphabet

The Mycenaeans are gone. Now Greece is full of barbarians—the Dorians from up north, and the Sea People (who are also called the Philistines), who invaded Greece from the Mediterranean Sea.

But wait! Something strange is happening. The longer these barbarians live in Greece, the more civilized they become. They’re no longer wandering around looking for cities to attack. Instead, they’re settling into villages. They’re learning how to farm and fish. They’re becoming—Greeks!

The Dorians and the Sea People lived in Greece for hundreds of years. They looked less and less like wild warrior tribes, and more and more like civilized merchants, farmers, and storekeepers. They started building houses. Their houses became fancier and fancier, with kitchens, rooms for taking baths, and separate rooms for men and women to entertain their friends. Soon they started building houses close to each other, in villages. Then the villages grew even larger, into cities—each one with its own government and its own army. They learned how to grow olives, grapes, figs, and wheat, and how to make wine from the grapes. Instead of riding out to kill their neighbors, they learned how to enjoy civilized sports like wrestling, chariot racing, and horseback riding. They loved to dance—at weddings, at funerals, at feasts, and at sports events. As a matter of fact, they soon invented over two hundred dances to use on all occasions.

The women no longer went out foraging for food, and they certainly didn’t spend their time putting up tents, washing and cooking like barbarian women. Instead, they spent their time indoors, away from the sun, so that their skin would remain smooth and beautiful. They kept slaves to do all the hard work.

Now these barbarians were known, simply, as Greeks.

We know more about these early Greeks than we know about the barbarians, because the early Greeks soon learned how to read and write. They started to write down stories about their ancestors. They started to write down the myths and fairy tales that they told their children. And we still have some of this writing today.

The early Greeks didn’t use the same alphabet that we use. They used their own letters. They probably learned some of these letters from the Phoenicians, who had one of the first alphabets. Here are some Greek letters:

This is called an alpha. If you think it looks like an “a,” you’re right. It sounds like an “a” too. The alphabet that we use today borrowed many of its letters from the ancient Greeks. Here is a kappa, a Greek letter that makes the same sound as our “k”:

And here is a tau, a Greek letter that makes the “t” sound:

And here is a Greek beta, a letter that makes the “b” sound:

Our alphabet is named after the Greek letters alpha and beta. Can you hear the letters alpha and beta in the word alphabet?

Other Greek letters don’t look anything like our letters. Here is a Greek letter called a psi. It makes the sound “ps”—that’s a sound we don’t use in English.

The psi looks a little bit like a trident, a three-pronged weapon carried by the Greek god Poseidon, who lived in the sea. The letter is named after Poseidon too. Can you hear the psi sound in Poseidon’s name?

Here is one more Greek letter. It is called a theta, and it makes the sound that our letters “th” make when you say them together:

Even though some of the Greek letters are different from ours, we owe a lot of our alphabet to the Greeks. If you have an A, B, E, H, I, K, M, N, O, P, T, X, Y, or Z in your name, you are using a Greek letter whenever you write your name. How would your name sound if the Greeks had never invented these letters?