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Barry Bruce Powell (born 1942) is an American classical scholar who is the author of the textbookClassical Myth. Trained atBerkeley andHarvard, he is a specialist inHomer and in the history of writing.^{[citation needed]} Powell is currently the Halls-Bascom Professor of Classics Emeritus at theUniversity of Wisconsin–Madison.^[1]

Powell's studyHomer and the Origin of the Greek Alphabet advances the controversial thesis that a single man invented theGreek alphabet expressly in order to record the poems of Homer.^[2] HisWriting: Theory and History of the Technology of Civilization (Wiley-Blackwell 2009) rejects the standard theories of the origins of bothSumerian cuneiform and thePhoenician alphabet as deriving from pictograms.^[3] He attempts to create a scientific terminology and taxonomy for the study of writing.

Powell has also translated a number of works, including theIliad,^[4] theOdyssey, theAeneid and the poems ofHesiod. HisGreek Poems to the Gods includes translation and commentary on Greek hymns from Homer toProclus.

• Homer and the Origin of the Greek Alphabet, Cambridge University Press, 1991
• Writing and the Origins of Greek Literature, Cambridge University Press, 2003
• Homer, Wiley-Blackwell, 2004, 2nd ed. 2007
• Writing: Theory and History of the Technology of Civilization, Wiley-Blackwell, 2009
• Classical Myth, eighth edition, Pearson, 2014

• The Iliad, Oxford University Press, 2013
• The Odyssey, Oxford University Press, 2014
• Vergil's Aeneid, Oxford University Press, 2015
• The Poems of Hesiod: Theogony, Works and Days, the Shield of Heracles, University of California Press 2017
• Greek Poems to the Gods, University of California Press, 2021

• Personal page at University of Wisconsin–Madison (archived 2012)

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