Why Is Phoenician Alphabet Important In Ancient Greece

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Greeks living within Phoenicia borrowed the existing Phoenician alphabet, spreading alphabet to Greece using Phoenician trade routes. Andrew Robinson, in Writing and Script, writes that the Greeks must have borrowed the Phoenician script in the early phase of its development, not after it had settled down. The alphabet was then spread through Etruscan and Roman expansion.
Although the concept of Greeks borrowing the Phoenician alphabet and carrying it to Greece via Phoenician trade routes is not supported by solid evidence, it is supported in part by the timeline pertaining to stability of writing direction in early Greece and Phoenicia. Greece possessed varying writing directions until roughly 1050 BC, while the Phoenician alphabet remained