Homeric epics composed and the Greek alphabet adopted
- Date
- c. 750 BCE
- Category
- Culture, arts & philosophy
- Region
- Greece (Ionia and Aegean)
- Era
- Classical Antiquity
- Significance
Around the second half of the eighth century BCE the Iliad and the Odyssey, attributed to Homer, reached the monumental form that would define Greek literature. Drawing on centuries of oral tradition about the Trojan War, the epics were composed in a literary blend of Ionic and other dialects.
Their fixing coincided with one of the most consequential technological shifts in Greek history: the adaptation of the Phoenician consonantal script into the Greek alphabet, the first writing system to represent vowels fully. This made it feasible to record lengthy compositions, laws, dedications and commerce in a script that was comparatively easy to learn. The Homeric poems became the shared cultural inheritance of the Greek world, central to education, religion and a sense of common Hellenic identity, and the wellspring of later epic, tragedy and philosophy. The alphabet, spread through trade and colonisation, underpinned the rise of literate civic culture in the emerging polis and was later transmitted, via the Etruscans, into the Latin alphabet of the West. Scholars debate whether the epics were written down in the late eighth or the seventh century, but their formative impact on Western literature is unrivalled.
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Empires active in c. 750 BCE
- Neo-Assyrian Empire911 BCE – 609 BCE
- Zhou Dynasty1046 BCE – 256 BCE
- Scythians800 BCE – 300 BCE
- Kingdom of Kush1070 BCE – 350 CE
- Phoenician City-States1200 BCE – 539 BCE
- Kingdom of Urartu860 BCE – 590 BCE
Related culture, arts & philosophy events
- First Olympic Games held at Olympia776 BCE (traditional)
- Life and teaching of Confucius in China551–479 BCE
- The Library of Ashurbanipal at Ninevehc. 647 BCE
- Thales of Miletus and the predicted eclipse: the dawn of natural philosophy28 May 585 BCE (traditional)
- Pythagoras founds his school at Crotonc. 530 BCE
- Darius I's Behistun Inscriptionc. 520 BCE
Further reading
The wider story
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