Although writing makes no appearance in the poems of Homer and Hesiod, when these poems assumed their final form ca. 700, writing was already widespread in the Greek world. Our earliest examples of writing, scratched or painted on pottery, come from around 750 or a little earlier. Whether this means that writing was introduced not long before this date, or two or three centuries earlier is a matter of debate. For our purposes, the exact date is of little importance. We can only use the material we have, and since none of the inscriptions from the first century of our evidence is legal in nature, we can be fairly confident that whatever the date of the invention of the alphabet, the Greeks did not begin writing laws before ca. 650.

As we noted earlier (Introduction) after the collapse of Bronze-Age civilization in the twelfth century, a new kind of writing emerged, an alphabetic script that developed from a Phoenician alphabetic script, with the important innovation that the Greeks added signs for vowels, which were lacking in the Near-Eastern alphabets of the time. This innovation made the Greek script easier to read than the consonant alphabets of the Near East (see most recently B. Powell 2002).