Before the appearance of the Greek alphabet, the island had its own unique writing system. The Cypriot syllabary is a syllabary writing system that was used in Cyprus until the 3rd century BC.
There are 56 characters in the alphabet of this letter, one for each word.
It is interesting that this writing system was originally developed by people living in Cyprus who did not speak Greek. The alphabet is believed to have originated from the Cypro-Minoan script and shares 20 symbols with it. This older version was written from the 11th century BC; later, by the 6th century BC, the Cypriot syllabary was already dominant.
It survived until the time when the Ptolemaic dynasty captured the island. Then in Cyprus they began to write using the Greek alphabet. However, the previously Greek-speaking population of the island wrote Greek words in their own script.
Hundreds of tablets and monuments with the Cypriot syllabary have been found in Cyprus, Syria and Egypt. Some of them contained parallel text with Greek or other languages, which helped decipher the symbols. Examples of such inscriptions can be seen on artifacts in the Cyprus Historical Museum in Nicosia.
Syllabics used a system of open syllables. In the case of a closed syllable, the syllable ending in “e” was written last, and the vowel itself was not pronounced. Some consonants in a closed syllable could be omitted. For example, “man” in Greek would be “anthropos”, which in Cypriot syllabary was written “𐠀𐠰𐠦𐠡𐠩”, or “a-to-ro-po-se”. Cypriots wrote from right to left.
Below you can see the complete list of all 56 syllables.
Alina Moseykina
Sources: Encyclopedia Britannica, Omniglot, Wikipedia
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