The Greek alphabet: vowels, alpha and omega and the number of words

When the Greeks adopted the Phoenician letters, probably in the eighth century BC, they carried out a small revolution. Some signs that indicated consonants absent from their language were reused for vowels: aleph became alpha, he became epsilon, yod became iota, ayin became omicron. For the first time an alphabet systematically recorded both consonants and vowels, and this model then passed to the Etruscans, to the Romans and, through them, to the whole of Europe.

The first inscriptions

Among the oldest evidence of Greek writing is a jug found in Athens near the Dipylon gate, datable to around 740 BC, which bears a verse about a dancing contest. Almost contemporary is the so-called Nestor's cup, discovered at Pithekoussai, on the island of Ischia, the first Greek colony in the West. It carries an inscription in verse that playfully alludes to the famous cup of Nestor sung by Homer.

For centuries each region had its own local alphabet, with small differences in the shape and value of the letters. It was the Euboean variant, used by the settlers of Cumae, that reached the Etruscans and thus Rome. In Athens, on the other hand, in 403 BC, during the archonship of Eucleides, the Ionic alphabet of twenty-four letters was officially adopted, and it became the standard of classical Greek.

Myths of invention and symbolic letters

The Greeks attributed the origin of letters to the Phoenician Cadmus, but they also knew other stories. A tradition reported by the Latin mythographer Hyginus credited Palamedes with inventing some letters and the poet Simonides with adding others. These myths show an awareness that the alphabet had not been born all at once, but had formed through successive additions.

Some letters acquired strong symbolic value. Upsilon, with its forked shape, was read as an image of the two paths of life, that of virtue and that of vice, and was called the «letter of Pythagoras» by Latin authors such as Persius. In the Revelation of John, God declares: «I am the Alpha and the Omega», that is, the beginning and the end, and the two letters became a constant emblem of Christian art.

Isopsephy and the seven vowels

As in Hebrew, Greek letters also served as numbers: alpha was one, beta two, up to omega, which was eight hundred. Adding up the values of a word and comparing it with others of the same total was called isopsephy. Irenaeus of Lyon reports that the followers of the Gnostic Basilides revered the name Abrasax, whose value is three hundred and sixty-five, like the days of the year. The same name appears on many magical gems of the imperial age.

Vowels played a special role in late antique religiosity. The rhetorician Demetrius, in the treatise On Style, writes that Egyptian priests sang hymns to the gods by uttering the seven vowels in succession. In the Greek magical papyri from Egypt, long vowel sequences are associated with the seven planets and the seven heavens. These are historical testimonies of ancient beliefs, not practices to be reproduced.

From the Dipylon jug to Byzantine codices, the Greek alphabet transmitted poetry, philosophy, science and sacred texts such as the New Testament. Its ability to represent sounds precisely made it an extraordinary instrument of culture, and its symbolic dimension, between numbers and mystical letters, long accompanied the religious history of the Mediterranean.