THE HISTORY OF OLD ROME

I. The Period Anterior to the Abolition of the Monarchy

From: The History of Rome, by Theodor Mommsen
Translated with the sanction of the author by William Purdie Dickson

CHAPTER XIV - Measuring and Writing

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Page 17

It was the Indians and Greeks who first independently of each other and by very divergent methods created, out of the Aramaean consonantal writing brought to them by commerce, a complete alphabet by the addition of the vowels--which was effected by the application of four letters, which the Greeks did not use as consonantal signs, for the four vowels -a -e -i -o, and by the formation of a new sign for -u --in other words by the introduction of the syllable into writing instead of the mere consonant, or, as Palamedes says in Euripides,

τὰ τῆς γε λήθης φάρμακ΄ ὀρθώσας μόνος͵ / ἄφωνα φωνήεντα συλλαβὰς τιθεὶς / ἐξηῦρον ἀνθρώποισι γράμματ΄ εἰδέναι

This Aramaeo-Greek alphabet was accordingly brought to the Italians through the medium, doubtless, of the Italian Greeks; not, however, through the agricultural colonies of Magna Graecia, but through the merchants possibly of Cumae or Tarentum, by whom it would be brought in the first instance to the very ancient emporia of international traffic in Latium and Etruria--to Rome and Caere.

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