Black figure in the context of "Euphiletos Painter"

The history of the Greek alphabet starts with the adoption of Phoenician letter forms in the 9th–8th centuries BC during early Archaic Greece and continues to the present day. The Greek alphabet was developed during the Iron Age, centuries after the loss of Linear B, the syllabic script that was used for writing Mycenaean Greek until the Late Bronze Age collapse and Greek Dark Age. This article concentrates on the development of the alphabet before the modern codification of the standard Greek alphabet.

The Phoenician alphabet was consistently explicit only about consonants, though even by the 9th century BC it had developed matres lectionis to indicate some, mostly final, vowels. This arrangement is much less suitable for Greek than for Semitic languages, and these matres lectionis, as well as several Phoenician letters which represented consonants not present in Greek, were adapted according to the acrophonic principle to represent Greek vowels consistently, if not unambiguously.

Upsilon (US: /ˈʌpsɪlɒn, ˈ(j)uːp-, -lən/, UK: /(j)uːpˈsaɪlən, ˈʊpsɪlɒn/ ; uppercase Υ, lowercase υ; Greek: ύψιλον ýpsilon [ˈipsilon]) or ypsilon /ɪp-/ is the twentieth letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, Υʹ has a value of 400. It is derived from the Phoenician waw .

Panathenaic amphorae were the amphorae, large ceramic vessels, that contained the olive oil given as a prize in the Panathenaic Games. Some were ten imperial gallons (12 US gal; 45 L) and 60–70 cm (24–28 in) high. This oil came from the sacred grove of Athena at Akademia. The amphorae which held it had the distinctive form of tight handles, narrow neck and feet, and they were decorated with consistent symbols, in a standard form using the black figure technique, and continued to be so, long after the black figure style had fallen out of fashion. Some Panathenaic amphorae depicted Athena Promachos, goddess of war, advancing between columns brandishing a spear and wearing the aegis, and next to her the inscription τῶν Ἀθήνηθεν ἄθλων "(one) of the prizes from Athens". On the back of the vase was a representation of the event for which it was an award. Sometimes roosters are depicted perched on top of the columns. The significance of the roosters remains a mystery. Later amphorae also had that year's archon's name written on it making finds of those vases archaeologically important.

The vases were commissioned by the state from the leading pottery workshops of the day in large numbers. Their canonical shape was set by 530 BC, but the earliest known example is the Burgon vase (British Museum, B130), which depicts Athena's owl nestling on the neck of the vase and on the reverse is a synoris team. This may mean that the vase predates the festival's reorganization in 566 since it is not an athletic event. The cock column is first seen on a panathenaic by Exekias (Karlsruhe 65.45). By the early fourth century the inclusion of the archon's name appears on these vases, the earliest almost intact one being Asteios 373/2 BC. (Oxford, 1911.257). There is a fragment that bears the name Hippodamas of 375/4 BC, however, which may also be a panathenaic, and Beazley suggests there may be a preceding one, Pythokles of 392/1.