Endnote 15 – Searching for the Historical Homer

Some would contest the claim that writing disappeared during the Dark Age. Since an alphabet was in use in the Near East in the second millennium, some scholars argue that it was introduced into the Aegean in the late second or early first millennium. See Joseph Naveh, The Early History of the Alphabet(Leiden, the Netherlands: E.J. Brill, 1982). As far as actual evidence goes, however, the earliest alphabetic inscriptional evidence from Greece dates only from the eighth century B.C., and there is no trace of the earlier Linear B script after the collapse of the palace centers.