The spoken Greek language has been around a lot longer than its alphabet. The alphabet we use for Biblical Greek text was first used around 750 BC.

Before 750 BC, a completely different alphabet was used, which we call ‘Linear B.’ This script is found on clay tablets found at various sites in Greece, dated as far back as 1300 BC.

The B in `Linear B’ implies the existence of a ‘Linear A’, which was found in use in Crete around 1700 BC. Linear A has never been deciphered, and it may represent a pre-Greek language that is only loosely connected with the Ancient Greek language.

Linear B was first deciphered in 1952 by a man named Michael Ventris. Michael demonstrated that Linear B was an early form of Greek and revealed that the Linear B tablets were a list of goods stored in a Mycean fortress. This fortress was excavated by a German archaeologist named Heinrich Schliemann in the 1870s. The task of deciphering Linear B was aided by the fact that the tablets had diagrams of the goods they described.

The fortress belonged to the Mycenean civilization, which declined around about 1200 BC, after which it appears that the art of writing was lost for a time.

It wasn’t until the eighth century that Greece appears to have borrowed the Phonecian alphabet from their Phonecian trading partners. At this point, the alphabet was a set of symbols. In Phonecian, each symbol had a specific meaning. i.e., the Greek letter alpha was derived from the Phonecian word ‘alph’ which was the word for ‘ox.’

Although there have been some small shifts in how the Greek letters are pronounced, the alphabet itself has remained effectively the same from that point up until now, except for one main point.

Initially, the Greek language was written in what we English speakers would describe as uppercase letters; lowercase letters only appeared later. The initial “uppercase” letters are named “uncials.” The lowercase letters, named “miniscules,” first appeared in the 9th and 10th centuries AD.