| Inventory Number: | H 165 | |
| Title: | Fragment from the Base and Lower Body with Graffito | |
| Description: | Joins with H 184. Two lines retrograde. Line 1:-ΑΒΓΔΕ- Line 2:-ΑΒΓΔΕF- Two incomplete abecederia, perhaps of teacher and pupil. In the second line the delta resembles a Boiotian or Euboian type, but this is probably only the result of a slip of the stylus in the hand of an inexperienced writer. The other letters in this line are also misshapen and should probably be explained likewise. The sixth letter of the second line preserves only the lower part of a vertical stroke. This cannot be zeta, but must part of a digamma. The presence of digamma in the Attic abecedarium agrees well with Jeffery's argument that an illiterate people, in acquiring literacy, would receive wholesale the alphabet of its teacher. In so doing, the illiterates would encounter certain superfluous letters which had no sound value in their dialect, and which they would never or rarely use in writing. They would retain such letters in their abecedarium, however since they lacked the critical judgment and experience to emend the new alphabet to their own needs. Digamma had no phonetic value in the Attic alphabet, but its presence is explained by Jeffery's discussion. Mabel Lang has published several 7th and 6th c. abecedaria from the Athenian Agora which also contain digamma. It should be noted that digamma kept its place in the developed Attic alphabet because it was used in the alphabetic numeral system of Attica. | |
| Context: | Votive dump. | |
| Bibliography: | Hesperia Suppl. 16 (1975), no. 20, p. 17, fig. 7, pl. 4. | |
| A.J.A. 44 (1940), p. 8, no. 9. |