Runes & Ancient Writing

Unit III: The Mediterranean Masters

Good day, scholars.
The alphabet has traveled far: from Sinai miners to Phoenician ships to the scribes of a Persian empire. Now it reaches the shores of the Mediterranean, and here it meets the people who will perfect it, or nearly so.
The Greeks did something no one before them had done. They looked at the Phoenician consonant alphabet and asked a question no Semitic scribe had needed to ask: where are the vowels? Their language required them, so they took five spare consonant signs the Greeks had no use for and repurposed them, letter by letter, into A, E, I, O, U. It sounds like a small edit. It is the reason you can sound out this sentence.
But the story does not stop in Greece. The Etruscans, Italy's elegant and mysterious predecessors to Rome, adopted the Greek letters and remade them in their own image, keeping some letters they never used and inventing new ones they needed. Then Rome took the Etruscan alphabet, carved it into stone with serifs and perfect spacing, and produced the monumental capitals that became the most widely used alphabet on earth. And because an empire must also count, this unit closes with the Roman numerals: a system that tallied legions and taxes without zero and without place value, and made it work for a thousand years.
Four lessons. Three alphabets and a number system. The letters on your screen are about to start looking familiar.
-Professor Thistleloom Webblethorn

Unit Learning Objectives

By the end of this unit, scholars will be able to:

Explain how and why the Greeks repurposed Phoenician consonant signs into vowels, letter by letter.
Identify the 24 classical Greek letters and trace the alphabet's descendants, including Latin and Cyrillic.
Describe how the Etruscans adapted the Greek alphabet, including letters they kept but never used and the new sign for /f/.
Identify the 23 letters of the classical Latin monumental alphabet and explain the creation of G and the addition of Y and Z.
Explain the leading theory of the serif's origin and what Roman monumental style reveals about its makers.
Read and write Roman numerals, explain their Etruscan tally-stick origins, and describe how Romans worked without zero or place value.

What Scholars Will Practice

You will draw the Greek alphabet and mark each letter's Phoenician ancestor. You will study the Etruscan abecedarium and puzzle over its unused letters. You will practice Roman monumental capitals, feeling how the chisel's logic lives in the letterforms, and you will read and write Roman numerals until the additive and subtractive systems feel natural. By the unit's end, try this: look at any inscription-style sign or monument in your town and read its Roman numerals aloud. The empire is closer than you think.

In This Unit

Lesson 7: Greek — The Invention of Vowels.

How the Greeks stole a consonant alphabet and gave it vowels, letter by letter, in the most consequential edit writing ever received.

Lesson 8: Etruscan — The Hidden Intermediary.

The forgotten bridge between Greek and Latin letters, including the Marsiliana tablet's 26 letters and the ones the Etruscans never used.

Lesson 9: Latin — The Architecture of Stone.

Rome's monumental capitals: serifs, interpuncts, the 23-letter classical alphabet, and the double duty of I and V.

Lesson 10: Roman Numerals — The Tally Matrix.

Counting an empire without zero or place value: the seven symbols, the tally-stick theory, and why IIII came before IV.

Onward
Rome's letters are settled, carved in stone, built to last millennia. But the alphabet is about to leave the Mediterranean entirely and head north, into forests and fjords, where the writing surface is wood and bone and the tool is the knife. The letters will shed every curve to survive. In Unit IV, at last, the runes.
— Professor Thistleloom Webblethorn