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Sure, Phoenicians proper had a large trade system. But so did the Greeks and those Greek descendants writing Old Italic scripts. And then the Roman empire con
by jdmichal 6y ago
Sure, Phoenicians proper had a large trade system. But so did the Greeks and those Greek descendants writing Old Italic scripts. And then the Roman empire conquered all of those and had peak extent around 117, which means that the Latin alphabet was also introduced and was a very close and strong cultural presence by 160.
So yes, that date is only an upper bound. But there's a reason the scholars in this area believe what they do regarding the origins. For the type of cultural contact that can lead to the adoption of a writing system, that kind of closeness is important. You can't just handwave away a gap of several actual human generations, while at the same time ignoring the other major powers that are much closer and certainly exerting stronger cultural pressure than Carthage.
- ncmncm 6y agoSure, but you still need an explanation for what would have to be reversion to ancestral forms of an italic script. There would have been a lot of refugees from the Punic disasters, and staying a long way from Roman centers would favor survival. Being the only literate group in a wide area would explain the surrounding majority's adoption of a non-standard script, otherwise a mystery. Use of the script could be confined to ephemera indefinitely long before a change that led to its use to inscribe durable material, so a gap, while inconvenient for historians, is hardly disposative.