Inscriptions on new archaeological finds in the Aegean, examined alongsidelinguistic evidence relating to Greek and Phrygian vowels, are here used toexplore the origins and spread of the Greek alphabet. The ‘invention’ ofvowels happened just once, with all of the various Greek, Phrygian andItalic alphabets ultimately deriving from this single moment. The ideaspread rapidly, from an absence of writing in the ninth century BC to casualusage, including jokes, by 725 BC. The port of Methone in the northernAegean emerges as a probable candidate for the site of origin. A place whereGreeks and Phoenicians did business together, with international networks;was this where Semitic, Greek and Phrygian letters first coalesced?

The importance of the Greeks in the history of alphabetic writing is paramount. All alphabets used in Europe today stand in direct or indirect relation to the ancient Greek. Several other alphabets—some long out of use—were also of Greek origin. That the Greek alphabet was not an original invention, but was in fact directly adapted from that of the North-west Semitic peoples (including the Phoenicians, the Aramaeans, and the ancient Hebrews), is now the opinion of all serious scholars. That the adaptation took place in the first two or three centuries of the 1st millennium B.C. is the increasingly accepted view, though scholarly dispute on the subject, complicated by an almost total lack of positive evidence, remains intense. It is worth adding that no evidence has hitherto been found that writing of any kind was employed in Greece between the time of the Linear B tablets of Pylos (c. 1200 B.c.) and the taking over of the North-Semitic alphabet.

With disarmingly open conceit, the Younger Pliny tells Pontius Allifanus that ‘my hendecasyllables are read, are copied, are even sung, and Greeks (who have learned Latin out of love for my poetry book) make my verses resound to cithara and lyre’ (Epist. 7.4.9). By Pliny's time, Greek musicians (and actors) were widely distributed and organized in a worldwide guild centred at Rome, so it will not surprise us that Greeks are the ones setting the verses to music. But what sort of music? When Pliny went out to hear his beloved poems sung to cithara and lyre, what did it sound like? Or, more generally, what did Pliny, or Martial, or, in an earlier generation, Horace see and hear when out for an evening's musical entertainment at the hands of a Greek troupe? Until fairly recently, we have known precious little. Literary sources give the odd anecdote, such as the reports of Nero's performances, but in general tell us little specific about the content or style of musical entertainment in the Roman era. And sources speaking more technically about music itself lend the impression that nothing significant happened after the ‘New Music’ was introduced in the fourth century BC.

Material from earlier as well as recent excavations at Palaepaphos is considered; it is now clear that a considerable quantity of pottery was imported from the Aegean during the thirteenth century and earlier; this is summarily described. Evidence for a Chalcolithic settlement is analysed. Finally, pottery from the intervening Middle Bronze Age is advanced as an indication of occupation at Kouklia in MC II–MC III times.

Most of the material published in this study is at present housed in the National Museum at Athens or in the museum at Eretria. It was excavated by the Greek Archaeological Service and under the direction of Kourouniotes over the period of years 1897–1917; annual reports were published in PAE. The vases which Kourouniotes published in AE 1903 and the black figure amphorae published by Laurent in AE 1901 were taken to Athens, together with all the complete subgeometric and orientalising grave amphorae and a number of other fragments now in an apotheke of the National Museum. The remainder, mainly sherds, was left in a small museum at Eretria. Unfortunately the pottery in Eretria has suffered in the course of time. No record of provenance has been kept and tomb groups are confused; complete profiles are hard to find as many plain fragments of body or foot had been thrown away or have since been lost. Much also had not been thoroughly cleaned, hence the hitherto unnoticed inscriptions on the archaic amphora (no. 17, p. 43 below).

The three lekythoi with black figures on a white ground, now published for the first time on Plates I., II., and III., were found in 1888 in the excavations carried on by the Greek Government on the site of the ancient Eretria. They are now in the Central Museum at Athens, and have been catalogued and briefly described by M. Staes in the Δελτίον ἀρχαιολογικόν for 1889 (pp. 99 and 139). The vases are of almost unique interest: two of them belonging to the cycle of the adventures of Odysseus, subjects from which have proved so curiously rare in vase-painting, while the third gives an episode in the story of Herakles and Atlas, of which the solitary monumental instance up to now had been the famous metope of Olympia (Friederichs-Wolters, 280). The beauty of the vases, the perfect state of their technique and of their preservation, no less than the interesting problems connected with mythography which they raise, have already won for them considerable celebrity; I therefore wish to record my special thanks to the Ephors of Antiquities in Athens for allowing me the publication of the vases—so graciously accorded to me during my studentship at the British School at Athens in 1891. Mr. Ernest Gardner, Director of our School, had the kindness to supervise the drawings which have been executed by M. Gilliéron. It had been my intention to make the publication of these lekythoi the occasion for a discussion of white-faced ware in connection with the whole subject of Greek painting proper, but I have unfortunately been prevented from collecting the necessary material in time for the present number of the Journal.

Two joining sherds of an East Greek ‘proto-Bird Bowl’, found in Dr Andreiomenou's excavations at Eretria, bear a three-line graffito text very similar in structure, if not in content, to that on Nestor's cup from Pithekoussai. The piece must be of approximately the same date.

Previous studies across languages (English, Spanish, French) have argued that perceptual salience and cue reliability can explain cross-linguistic differences in early comprehension of verbal agreement. Here we tested this hypothesis further by investigating early comprehension in Greek, where markers have high salience and reliability (compared to Spanish and English) predicting early comprehension, as in French. We investigated two and three-year-old Greek-speaking children's ability to distinguish third person singular and plural agreement in a picture-selection task. We also examined the frequency of these morphemes in child-directed speech to address input effects. Results showed that three-year-olds are sensitive to both singular and plural agreement, earlier than children acquiring English and Spanish, but later than French, and despite singular agreement being more frequent than plural agreement in the child corpus. These findings provide further support for the role of salience and reliability during early acquisition, while highlighting a potential effect of morpheme position.