Transition Note - 4. Alphanumeric Notation and the Calendrical-Musical Kosmos
From The Observatory
Transition Note
Quoted text:
The breakthrough to alphabetic writing seems to have been inspired from quite a different direction. A set of about 28 symbols had been created to signify the days in the lunar month, the gamut of tones in the musical scale, or perhaps both. These signs were applied to the verbal phonemes which became the basis for the Canaanite-Greek-Roman alphabet, which has cuneiform precedents going at least as far back as Ugarit c. 1400 BC.
[Omitted text: Transition from MUSIC chapter to ALPHABET chapter 5:]
Snodgrass[1] (1980: p. 79) has remarked that “Linear B was essentially an administrative script, used by palace scribes for official documentation, and occasionally by craftsmen… But graffiti hardly appear, and public inscriptions not at all. We infer that very few people could read the script… If it was the almost exclusive preserve of the palace bureaucracies, as seems likely, then their disappearance will have removed its raison d’être. The early alphabetic inscriptions show a sharp contrast. … They refer to private matters—ownership, entertainment, personal comments; a striking proportion of them are in verse. … and permanent inscriptions on stone follow” “[a]lready before 700 BC.”
Originally here, the author had a note: “Transition from MUSIC chapter to ALPHABET chapter 5:”. We think it might be a suggestion that something from or related to Chapter 5 (Music, Temperament, and Social Concord) belongs here. Can you use this tip and the Key Concepts section of Chapter 4 to fill in what was intended to go here?
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- ↑ Anthony Snodgrass, Archaic Greece: The Age of Experiment (London: 1980), p. 79.
