The Textualization of the Greek Alphabet by Roger D. Woodard (review)

Woodard’s study begins with an examination of three copper plaques inscribed with abecedaria, dated to the late ninth or early eighth centuries bc, of uncertain purpose, allegedly from the Egyptian Faiyum. Two of the plaques are in the possession of a Norwegian private collector; the third is held by the Martin von Wagner Museum in Würzburg, Germany. Woodard calls the abecedaria the “Greek alphabet,” although the abecedaria lack upsilon, the supplemental letters phi, chi, and psi, and omega. On the face of it they are not Greek alphabetic abecedaria at all, but West Semitic exemplars. This book is a study in West Semitic epigraphy, but Woodard does not realize this. He seems not to understand what an alphabet is: it is not letter shapes, with which this book is much concerned, but the functioning of whole systems that counts in the history of writing.

Woodard proceeds to examine each character on the three plaques, noting their considerable differences in shape. Then he compares these forms with those found in archaic Greek inscriptions. But what does he hope to prove by such comparisons? He does not seem aware that archaic Greek inscriptions were composed by amateurs who consistently made “mistakes” and meaningless changes in outer form. Woodard imagines that he can derive chronological information from letter shapes, that shapes “evolve.” And so he speaks of the “typologically earliest” of four different shapes of alpha. Throughout, Woodard’s study is hampered by such unscientific assumptions. In assembling the variety of shapes encountered on the copper plaques he undermines his own evolutionary thesis, because they seem all to have been inscribed at a single time by a single scribe.

In a highly technical chapter by David A. Scott, inserted after the discussion of letter shapes, are presented the results of chemical and physical analysis of the plaques at the J. Paul Getty Institute. These results seem to confirm the antiquity of the plaques, although independent analysis of the German plaque has declared it a forgery. Scott finds the patina to be acceptable for a copper plaque buried for a long time.

A chapter called “The Syntagmatic Structure of the Copper Plaques” is devoted to a transcription of the abecedaria on the three tablets that notes the sometimes extravagant departures in the order of the signs from regular abecedaria. Woodard attempts to explain these irregularities in another chapter entitled Langue et écriture, in which, appealing to Saussure’s familiar dictum that writing is secondary to speech (Chinese writing?), Woodard attempts to show that portions of the plaques are in fact langue, not écriture. Not understanding that he is dealing with a Semitic inscription, he tries to find Greek words in the anomalous sequence of characters in the abecedaria. He finds the words smilê, some kind of tool, and lugos, a withe. He even discovers a mark of punctuation.

By “Textualization” in the book’s title, a word derivative from the Latin texere, “to weave,” Woodard seems to refer to the “weaving” in and out of alphabetic symbols that he finds on the plaques: the vertical dimension is the “warp” and the horizontal dimension is the “weft.” The book’s final chapter is devoted to the metaphor of weaving and writing, really a literary topic, but Woodard mistakes it for descriptive of the process of alphabetic writing itself. I do again wonder if Woodard knows what alphabetic writing is. In any event, a title should obviously describe a book’s contents, not depend on an elaborate and unlikely thesis contained within.

In its elaborate description of letter shapes, and in his prose generally, Woodard flirts with unintelligibility. The book is filled with charts and diagrams that do not elucidate, but confuse. Few will read this book with pleasure, or even apprehension. Nonetheless Woodard does provide a good description of an early West Semitic inscription of mysterious origin and purpose, and for that it may...