That the Cretans, at least, could write long before the age of Homer, Mr. Arthur Evans has demonstrated by his discoveries. Prom my remote undergraduate days I was of the opinion which he has proved to be correct, starting, like him, from what I knew about savage pictographs. {Footnote: Cretan Pictographs and Prae-Phoenician Script. London, 1905. Annual of British School of Athens, 1900-1901, p. 10. Journal of Hellenic Studies, 1897, pp. 327-395.}
M. Reinach and Mr. Evans have pointed out that in this matter tradition joins hands with discovery. Diodorus Siculus, speaking of the Cretan Zeus and probably on Cretan authority, says: "As to those who hold that the Syrians invented letters, from whom the Phoenicians received them and handed them on to the Greeks, ... and that for this reason the Greeks call letters 'Phoenician,' some reply that the Phoenicians did not {blank space} letters, but merely modified (transposed 3) the forms of the letters, and that most men use this form of script, and thus letters came to be styled 'Phoenician.'" {Footnote: Diodorus Siculus, v. 74. L'Anthropologie, vol. xi. pp. 497-502.} In fact, the alphabet is a collection of signs of palaeolithic antiquity and of vast diffusion. {Footnote: Origins of the Alphabet. A. L. Fortnightly Review, 1904, pp. 634-645}
Thus the use of writing for the conservation of the Epic cannot seem to me to be unlikely, but rather probable; and here one must leave the question, as the subjective element plays so great a part in every man's sense of what is likely or unlikely. That writing cannot have been used for this literary purpose, that the thing is impossible, nobody will now assert.
My supposition is, then, that the text of the Epic existed in AEgean script till Greece adapted to her own tongue the "Phoenician letters," which I think she did not later than the ninth to eighth centuries; "at the beginning of the ninth century," says Professor Bury. {Footnote: History of Greece, vol. i. p. 78. 1902.} This may seem an audaciously early date, but when we find vases of the eighth to seventh centuries bearing inscriptions, we may infer that a knowledge of reading and writing was reasonably common. When such a humble class of hirelings or slaves as the pot-painters can sign their work, expecting their signatures to be read, reading and writing must be very common accomplishments among the more fortunate classes.
If Mr. Gardner is right in dating a number of incised inscriptions on early pottery at Naucratis before the middle of the seventh century, we reach the same conclusion. In fact, if these inscriptions be of a century earlier than the Abu Simbel inscriptions, of date 590 B.C., we reach 690 B.C. Wherefore, as writing does not become common in a moment, it must have existed in the eighth century B.C. We are not dealing here with a special learned class, but with ordinary persons who could write. {Footnote: The Early Ionic Alphabet: Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. vii. pp. 220-239. Roberts, Introduction to Greek Epigraphy, pp. 31, 151, 159, 164, 165-167}
Interesting for our purpose is the verse incised on a Dipylon vase, found at Athens in 1880. It is of an ordinary cream-jug shape, with a neck, a handle, a spout, and a round belly. On the neck, within a zigzag "geometrical" pattern, is a doe, feeding, and a tall water-fowl. On the shoulder is scratched with a point, in very antique Attic characters running from right to left, {Greek: os nun orchaeston panton hatalotata pais ei, tou tode}. "This is the jug of him who is the most delicately sportive of all dancers of our time." The jug is attributed to the eighth century. {Footnote: Walters, History of Ancient Pottery, vol. ii. p, 243; Kretschmer, Griechischen Vasen inschriften, p. 110, 1894, of the seventh century. H. von Rohden, Denkmaler, iii. pp. 1945, 1946: "Probably dating from the seventh century." Roberts, op. cit., vol. i. p. 74, "at least as far back as the seventh century," p. 75.}
Taking the vase, with Mr. Walters, as of the eighth century, I do not suppose that the amateur who gave it to a dancer and scratched the hexameter was of a later generation than the jug itself. The vase may have cost him sixpence: he would give his friend a new vase; it is improbable that old jugs were sold at curiosity shops in these days, and given by amateurs to artists. The inscription proves that, in the eighth to seventh centuries, at a time of very archaic characters (the Alpha is lying down on its side, the aspirate is an oblong with closed ends and a stroke across the middle, and the Iota is curved at each end), people could write with ease, and would put verse into writing. The general accomplishment of reading is taken for granted.
Reading is also taken for granted by the Gortyn (Cretan) inscription of twelve columns long, boustro-phedon (running alternately from left to right, and from right to left). In this inscribed code of laws, incised on stone, money is not mentioned in the more ancient part, but fines and prices are calculated in "chalders" and "bolls" ({Greek: lebaetes} and {Greek: tripodes}), as in Scotland when coin was scarce indeed. Whether the law contemplated the value of the vessels themselves, or, as in Scotland, of their contents in grain, I know not. The later inscriptions deal with coined money. If coin came in about 650 B.C., the older parts of the inscription may easily be of 700 B.C.
The Gortyn inscription implies the power of writing out a long code of laws, and it implies that persons about to go to law could read the public inscription, as we can read a proclamation posted up on a wall, or could have it read to them. {Footnote: Roberts, vol. i. pp. 52-55.}
The alphabets inscribed on vases of the seventh century (Abecedaria), with "the archaic Greek forms of every one of the twenty-two Phoenician letters arranged precisely in the received Semitic order," were, one supposes, gifts for boys and girls who were learning to read, just like our English alphabets on gingerbread. {Footnote: For Abecedaria, cf. Roberts, vol. i. pp. 16-21.}