History of the Greek alphabet Plutarch criticizes Herodotus for prejudice and misrepresentation. Furthermore, he argues that "Gephyraei" were Euboeans or Eretrians and he doubts the reliability of Herodotus' sources. Plutarch and other ancient Greek writers credited the legendary Palamedes of Nauplion on Euboea with the invention of the supplementary letters not found in the original Phoenician alphabet. The distinction between "Eta" and "Epsilon" and between "Omega" and "Omicron", adopted in the Ionian standard, was traditionally attributed to Simonides of Ceos (556-469). Plutarch goes further back to describe an older Greek writing system, similar as he attested to the Egyptian writing. In his “Discourse Concerning Socrates’s
History of the Greek alphabet of the Stoudion monastery in Constantinople. The earliest type of books written in minuscule, dated from the mid-9th to mid-10th century, are called codices vetustissimi ('oldest codices'). During the following centuries, this style of writing was further developed and took on more cursive elements again. This became the dominant type of handwriting until the post-Byzantine period. Together with the minuscule letter shapes, Greek writing also began to use word-boundary spaces and diacritics (i.e. the accent marks and breathings of polytonic orthography) more regularly. Some punctuation began also to be employed. The iota subscript was employed from the 13th century onwards.