Arrows fly across the battlefield. Spears clash against shields. The year is 1200 BC, and the Trojan War is nearing its climax. A massive wooden horse creaks towards the city gates of Troy, a supposed gift of surrender with warriors hidden inside. Tomorrow, the great Troy will fall, and the Greeks will claim victory – though not all will live to tell the tale.

The Trojan War, if it really happened, was more likely a series of conflicts during Greece’s Late Bronze Age collapse. Over the following centuries, palaces would fall, cities would burn, and populations would decline. The Greeks even lost their writing systems and switched to oral tradition, passing stories by mouth – such as Homer’s Iliad, the story of Troy. Greek civilization entered a long dark age of four hundred years. Then, around 800 BC, the Greeks return to their former glory with the advent of democracy, philosophy, and a new alphabet.

This is history set in stone… or is it?

Willemijn Waal, a senior university lecturer in Assyriology and Hittite studies at Leiden University, is waging her own war – not with bows and spears, but an academic siege on a yet undefeated paradigm. Waal challenges the narrative of a “dark age,” and her argument centres on a simple but significant idea: the Greek alphabet is far older than thought.

“alphabetic big bang”

“The alphabet must have been introduced much earlier,” Waal says, “and there’s quite a bit of indirect evidence that points to this.” According to Waal, the widespread belief that there was an “alphabetic big bang” in 800 BC Greece is a misconception.

It is true that the first known inscriptions appear around this time. “These are for instance inscriptions on pottery, with small illusions to Homer.” But Waal argues that this is an oversimplistic view of the alphabet’s history. “It makes much more sense to think it was a gradual development.”

In the field of classics, this is a controversial take – Waal is challenging a century-old theory. “It’s almost a religion to some scholars,” she says. “For a long time, the idea was popular that the Greeks invented the alphabet because of Homer. A nice romantic idea,” Waal admits, but there isn’t much to support it. She explains that this idea is rooted in an old yet persistent Hellenocentric view of the ancient world – a belief that everything significant came from Greece.

This bias has been deeply ingrained in scholarship for centuries, although there has been some pushback before. “In the 1970s, people from the field of Semitic linguistics tried to challenge the paradigm, but the discussion at times got a bit nasty.”

Superior

There were even accusations of antisemitism, which Waal suggests were not completely baseless, if a bit extreme. “The whole idea that the Greeks were immensely active and therefore the alphabet spread and flowered … that implicitly sets aside the Phoenicians and Hebrew-speaking people (who also used an alphabetic writing system) as lazy and passive, right? On the other hand, I think it was for the most part unconscious. It was just the prevalent worldview at the time – the idea that the ‘West’ was somehow superior to ‘the rest’.”

Although Hellenocentrism has largely disappeared, the idea that the alphabet enabled democracy, rational thinking, and technological innovations still lingers. “Take a look at ancient China; they made many discoveries and developed philosophy without an alphabet.” After all, Chinese characters are logographs, symbols each representing a complete idea. “I do not believe that anyone would seriously claim that the Chinese are behind in technology.”

Waal isn’t afraid to take the lead in the uphill battle against the “dark age” theory. “I’ve been walking around with this idea for quite some time.” Waal started developing the hypothesis back in 2017, but many grant applications were rejected. “The pushback has been quite fierce.” Now Waal has received a prestigious Vici grant from the Dutch Research Council and is ready to shake things up in the world of classics.

She began by studying Latin and Greek at the University of Amsterdam, but out of interest also followed some courses on cuneiform studies. Cuneiform is a writing system from the ancient Near East used by Sumerians, Babylonians, and Hittites and famous for its wedge-shaped grooves pressed into clay.

fingerprints

“I got so fascinated by the cuneiform world. With classics, you stand in a long line of tradition. All these texts by authors like Homer and Virgil have been studied for centuries. Cuneiform has only been deciphered in the 19th century. You’re sometimes the first one to really look at a text – there are still many things to discover.”

To Waal, there is something very special about clay. “Sometimes we can still see the fingerprints of the scribe on the clay tablet. It’s a very direct way of being in touch with the past.” She began to consider the durability of clay – it can break, but it survives the elements much better than papyrus. “If a library burns down, the clay tablet in fact becomes more resistant. It just gets baked!”

That got her thinking about the materiality of writing – and what this means for classical studies. What if the oldest preserved Greek alphabet inscriptions on stone and pottery are actually the exception? What if, instead, most words were written on wood, papyrus, or other perishable materials? So Waal set out to explore this hypothesis.

Waal’s research proposal contains several lines of evidence. The first is a statistical argument. “In palaeontology, they use the Signor-Lipps effect. If you find one fossil, it would be a huge coincidence that it’s the very first of this particular species.” Why wouldn’t that be true with classics? While the first known traces of the Greek alphabet date to 800 BC, “it’s very optimistic to think that these were also the very first inscriptions that were ever made.”

Carbon dating provides additional evidence. This involves measuring the decay of radioactive carbon to determine the age of organic material. “Until recently, almost all the pottery was dated by means of stylistic features. But that’s not a very exact dating method.” The new radiocarbon dates show that some pieces of inscribed pottery may be 100-150 years older than was previously thought. “That would actually perfectly fit my hypothesis.”

Then there is the content of these earliest inscriptions. Yes, there were inscriptions referring to Homer, but “what’s often left out of the narrative is quite explicit graffiti on rocks. Boys boasting that they had intercourse with this or that girl.” But this vulgar vandalism is also notable. “Both [poetry and graffiti] are very uncommon first uses of writing. Normally, it’s initially used for more mundane purposes – writing letters, bookkeeping, and administrative purposes.” The vandalism and verses of Homer suggest that the writing was already much more widespread.

Messy

Waal shows a picture of a vase carved into clay. “Cuneiform started out as a very pictorial writing system, but then it becomes more abstract – and that is really due to the material.” Millennia later, the word for “vase” becomes a series of wedge shapes, only vaguely resembling a vase. “It’s not easy to draw in wet clay, because it’s a coarse material and it gets messy. The script therefore underwent changes – round lines made way for wedge-shaped signs that were more easily made with a stroke of the stylus.”

This is why Waal finds it remarkable that the first examples of the Greek alphabet are carved into stone and baked clay. The Greek alphabet has a lot of round shapes, such as theta (Θ) and omega (Ω). “If you see very round letter shapes incised in clay, that may indicate that normally, they would not be scratching it in baked clay, but it would be written on softer surfaces.” Namely, papyrus, parchment, or wood – materials that decayed over time but were common writing materials at the time.

Although her ideas have faced a lot of pushback in the past, Waal is optimistic. “There is a shift happening. Academia is slow, but I already see a younger, more open-minded generation. I’m sure I won’t convince everyone, but I think it’s important to make everyone aware of the problems of the current paradigm and all the new discoveries that have been made. You can then still think ‘Ah, I prefer the current paradigm,’ but then at least this is an informed conclusion.