Chapter 4 Critical Thinking Question 4

How were the Phoenicians instrumental in ending the Greek Dark Ages? When Phoenician ships began to arrive in Greece around 800 B.C.E., the Greeks began to send their own ships out into the Mediterranean in search of raw materials, trade opportunities, and fertile farmland. New ideas also arrived, such as the concepts of writing systems and naturalistic human and animal figures on painted pottery. Although the Phoenicians already had a writing system, they left the vowel sounds in their writings to be inferred by the reader. The Greeks used some of the Phoenician symbols for which there was no Greek equivalent to represent vowels, creating the first true alphabet.