Barry Bruce Powell (born 1942) is an American classical scholar who is the author of the textbook Classical Myth. Trained at Berkeley and Harvard, he is a specialist in Homer and in the history of writing.[citation needed] Powell is currently the Halls-Bascom Professor of Classics Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.[1]
Powell's study Homer and the Origin of the Greek Alphabet advances the controversial thesis that a single man invented the Greek alphabet expressly in order to record the poems of Homer.[2] His Writing: Theory and History of the Technology of Civilization (Wiley-Blackwell 2009) rejects the standard theories of the origins of both Sumerian cuneiform and the Phoenician alphabet as deriving from pictograms.[3] and attempts to create a scientific terminology and taxonomy for the study of writing.
Powell has also translated a number of works, including the Iliad,[4] the Odyssey, the Aeneid and the poems of Hesiod. His Greek Poems to the Gods includes translation and commentary on Greek hymns from Homer to Proclus.