Cadmus, Saviour of Awful Zeus & Guy Who Can Grow People from Dragon Teeth

My favorite Podcast,<3333

4.20 'Phoenicia being an ancient/mythological region in the Middle East. I am not totally sure how real it was' -Phoenicia was definitely real, and important! Roughly equating with modern Lebanon and (like Greece) split between city states and small kingdoms rather than under one ruler, the Phoenicians were from very early times active seafarers and traders throughout the Mediterranean and beyond (visiting Britain to trade for tin, one of the metals needed to make bronze.) They also established colonies in Sicily, southern Spain and Carthage in North Africa. Their language was quite closely related to that of their neighbours the Hebrews. Because the Phoenicians were active sailors, merchants and colonizers, the Greeks encountered them frequently and there was almost certainly significant cultural influence. The Greeks learned most of the letters of their alphabet from the Phoenicians, although the Greeks added the vowels, as has already been pointed out here. The Phoenicians were the main producers of the expensive purple dye that coloured the robes of the Roman Emperors and symbolised luxury in the Greco-Roman World and is the reason European monarchs still wear purple robes at their coronations today. (The Phoenician purple dye was very unusual in that instead of gradually fading with exposure to sunlight, as most clothes do, it actually became brighter over time.) Carthage, Ancient Rome's great rival, the city of Hannibal and of the (possibly mythical) Queen Dido, was a Phoenician (also called Punic) colony, which acquired a Republican constitution like the Romans and Athenians. The Phoenicians had a dark side, practicing human sacrifice, apparently sometimes even of their own children, and, at least in Carthage, sometimes crucifying unsuccessful military commanders. Although their system of writing has had immense influence (the alphabet in which I am writing this is basically the modernised version of the Roman version of the Etruscan version of the Greek version of Phoenician script) as far as we know they mainly used it for business records and simple inscriptions. Any imaginative literature or ideas of history, geography, science or ethics that they had seem to have remained a purely oral culture and hence has now been lost, except to the extent that its early influence on Ancient Greek, Roman and other cultures may still indirectly affect us now in ways we may not always realise.

Linear B has nothing directly to do with the origin of the Greek alphabet. It is not an alphabet but a syllabary. The Greek alphabet was adapted from the Phoenician, but with the crucial difference that Phoenician (like Ancient Egyptian, mostly) only wrote the consonants and left the reader to work out what the vowels and therefore words must be. Perhaps this was to allow the script to be understood over a larger area, if the vowels differed more than the consonants between different local dialects, I don't know. However, the Greeks added or adapted letters to represent the vowels as well, which not only made the writing easier to read, but meant we have more idea what the language sounded like and can more easily detect the rhythms of poetry.

I found the beginning of this a little confusing to follow but it got better, and contained some interesting stories of which I previously knew little. Disappointing that at time of writing, having been uploaded a year ago, this podcast has been viewed by less than 1,000 people and has only 25 Likes. I wonder if the name of the chemical element Cadmium has anything to do with Cadmus? I shall Google.

2:59 Are u talking about the Percy Jackson and the Olympian series?