"This is the sign ka," he said. "Also the sign for ga, kha, kai, kas, kan…"

And you have to figure out which from context, Walker thought. What an abortion of a writing system.

The real joker was that the script wasn't even well suited to Greek. The main ancestors of these clowns had arrived in Greece as illiterate barbarian war bands from the north; they'd picked up writing from the Minoan Cretans, along with most of what other feeble claims to civilization they had. The original script had been designed for a completely different language; all the signs for sounds ended in a vowel, and there were a whole bunch of Greek sounds that didn't have a sign at all.

Pathetic. Which was all to the good, of course. Not a day went by that he didn't bless Whoever or Whatever had caused the Event.

"Thank you, Enkhelyawon," he said to the scribe. No fucking wonder nearly everyone's illiterate here. "Now, how have you progressed with my people's script?"

In the original history, if "original" meant anything here, Mycenaean civilization was going to go under in another fifty years or so in a chaos of civil war and barbarian invasion; this writing system would be completely lost, and when the Greeks became literate again after their Dark Age it would be by borrowing the ancestral alphabet from the Phoenicians. The Romans would get it from the Greeks and then pass their version down to Western civilization… and here he was, teaching it to the ancestors of the Greeks. More weird shit.

"Lord, a child could master that script you showed me," Enkhelyawon said tolerantly. "Twenty-six signs? That is nothing."

He picked up another slab of prepared clay and quickly wrote out the Roman alphabet. "It is interesting, lord-I have yet to find a word that cannot be written in it."

"You won't," Walker said dryly. "And it can be learned by a child-that's the whole point."