Lost Language of the Minoans
They say the written language of Linear A will never be deciphered by modern linguists. Mysterious and elusive, the undeciphered script of Linear A illustrates our dearth of understanding about the culture of the Minoans, and the quest that many are on to try to understand this culture that seems to slip beneath the waves of history in the 15th century BC. The decipherment of Linear A would lead us to a better understanding of Crete, the Mediterranean, and the processes of the earliest European civilizations.
The Minoan civilization flourished on the island of Crete in the Mediterranean Sea from roughly 2050 BC to 1450 BC. It has been theorized that Minoan people emigrated to the island from mainland Asia sometime during the 2nd millenium BC.
Culturally, it was far ahead of many of its counterparts; great palaces, flourishing trade, beautiful art and craftsmanship, and a written language all exemplified the great intellectual achievements of this civilization. The language of the ancient Minoans has been given the rather dour appellation of Linear A. A mysterious language in itself which linguists struggle to even transliterate, let alone understand, Linear A's syllabary (inventory of signs which correspond to sounds) was utilized in the written forms of Ancient Greek and Old Cypriot (the language spoken on ancient Cyprus).
The downfall of Minoan civilization has been attributed to various factors, including the volcanic activity of the Mediterranean during the 15th century BC, which may have weakened the civilzation and allowed for the takeover of people from mainland Greece. In any case, during 1400s BC, culture on Crete drastically changed, with a new language, Ancient Greek, taking over the old syllabary of Linear A.
Fascinatingly, examples of Linear A has been discovered in Bulgaria, which may indicate early trade contacts, or possibly the origin of the Minoans themselves.
BOOKS:
Linear B and Related Scripts by John Chadwick (includes inscriptions in the deciphered Linear B [thought to be Ancient Greek in Linear A syllabary] and Linear A itself)
Minoans:Life in Bronze Age Crete by Rodney Castleden (on social life and culture)
The Foundations of Palatial Crete; a Survey of Crete in the Early Bronze Age by Keith Branigan
Minoan Religion: Ritual, Image and Symbol by Nanno Marinatos (on religion, evidently)
Mysteries of the Snake Goddess: Art, Desire, and the Forging of History by Kenneth D.S. Lapatin (on the forgery of the Snake Goddess, said to be an authentic Minoan statuette. Sounds really fascinating on modern views of the past and subjectivity in culture studies)
LINKS:
History
http://www.historywiz.com/minoans-mm.htm (beautiful art and artists renderings of the Palace era)
http://www.wsu.edu:8001/~dee/MINOA/MINOANS.HTM (wordy and informative about the most flourishing Minoan era and other parts of Minoan civilization)
Linear A
http://www.telecomtally.com/blog/2005/05/new_minoan_line.html
http://www.ancientscripts.com/lineara.html
http://www.people.ku.edu/~jyounger/LinearA/ (complex but good info on Linear A in all its permutations)
posted by Gillia Barrows at 12:06 PM
5 Comments:
Great site lots of usefull infomation here.
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1:58 PM
Actually, I am interested in the same matter. Having 'read' all the available material though over-and-over again some things have certainly become clearer (for me at least). I do not believe the Linear A script (or even the Phaistos Disc) would never be deciphered. Much shorter scripts of a single writing system have been already solved.
The problem in this case is, that the so-called 'Minoan' language is neither Greek, nor written in a way to make it easy to read. Basically, if you use a syllabary to a language that is well fit for it (e.g. Japanese), you get a script easy to read. But when a language contains a number of consonantal clusters, problems will incur. The same is the case with all the Cretan scripts. The way Linear A was written suggests, it suffered from the same problems as the latter Linear B (in Greek language) did: as there was no rule for consonantal clusters, sometimes (especially with N and S) the first consonant was omitted, on other occasions, an additional vowel was inserted. Ending consonants were always dropped. We can see, this is NOT the way to correctly document a language. We would even have troubles at reading, if we had written everything in a well-known language (e.g. English) !!!
Second, the language used on the tablets is clearly different from Greek (used on later Linear B). While we cannot 'guess' the exact language the tablets were written, we can make a lot of good points. First, the sound 'O', or its syllabary signs are rare, if they ever occur. Second, there are no signs for certain voiced consonants (B,G). D is an exception, but it might be explained in an alternative way (the difference between D and T might in fact reflect T and TH). These phonological characteristics all point to the Anatolian region, with its Indo-European languages (Hittite and Luwian) as well as non-Indo-European ones. Especially interesting is the case of Etruscan and Lemnian, which are both thought to be of Aegean or Western Anatolian origin.
Perhaps the closest relatives of the Minoan language was Eteocretan (spoken on Crete in classical time), and Eteocypriot. The latter occurs frequently on funerary inscriptions from the classical Cyprus, and therefore it has been at least partially deciphered. Interestingly, it was revealed to be not an Indo-European language, but one resembling to the Etruscan, both in vocabulary and grammar (see Wikipedia for more). Is it possible, that Ventris, who first thought the Minoan tablets to be of Etruscan origin, was not mistaken that much??
4:40 PM
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5:33 AM
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7:22 AM
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