Greek alphabet from which the later standard Greek alphabet emerged. Athens used a local form of the "light blue" alphabet type until the end of the fifth century BC, which lacked the letters Ξ and Ψ as well as the vowel symbols Η and Ω. In the Old Attic alphabet, stood for and for . was used for all three sounds (correspondinɡ to classical respectively), and was used for all of (corresponding to classical respectively). The letter (heta) was used for the consonant . Some variant local letter forms were also characteristic of Athenian writing, some of which were shared with the
History of the Greek alphabet them from certain digraphs which had become homophonous, as follows: The letters of the alphabet were used in the system of Greek numerals. For this purpose the letters digamma and qoppa (but not san) were retained although they had gone out of general use, and the obscure letter sampi was added at the end of the alphabet. Digamma was often replaced in numerical use by stigma (Ϛ), originally a ligature of sigma and tau, or even the sequence sigma-tau (στ'). The Old Italic and Anatolian alphabets are, like the Greek alphabet, attested from the 8th century BC. It is unclear