Aegean writing presentation. Aegean letter

“The Art of the Aegean World” - Image of the Minotaur. GOAT check. Northern Propylaea. Palace at Knossos. Get acquainted with Creto-Mycenaean art. Lion Gate. Sinkwine. Technologies used. Time Machine. Antique vase. Mycenaean art. Priestess. Vases. The Riddle of the Minotaur. Aegean art. Practical work. Name. Knossos palace.

“Artistic culture of the Ancient World” - Bell-shaped vessel. Venus of Willendorf. A special area of ​​primitive fine art is ornament. Stonehenge. Dolmens. Salisbury. Bison. People wrote stories about these animals. What did primitive artists paint with? Goat. Ancient civilizations. Work plan. From what sources do scientists learn about primitive culture?

“Culture of Babylon” - Mesopotamia. Culture of Mesopotamia. Ladder. Hanging Gardens. Old Babylonian period. City. Art of the Neo-Babylonian Kingdom. Gate of Ishtar. Geographical features of Mesopotamia. Pillar made of black basalt. Bible prophecies. Akkad. Assyria. Herodotus about Babylon. Palace decorations. House. The gate was lined with blue tiles.

“Lion Gate” - The pediment crowning the gate is made of solid limestone and decorated with a relief image of two lions. The lions' heads have not survived. In a strictly symmetrical bas-relief design, lions rise onto the façade of a building, surrounding a column. Lion Gate - entrance gate of the Acropolis of Mycenae Built in the mid-13th century BC. e. along with the expansion of the city's fortress wall.

“Culture of Ancient Asia” - Towers. Residents of the city. Invention of writing. External part. Golden helmet. Standard of Ur. Ruins of the gate. Babylon. Tower of Babel. Relief of the palace. Statue of Gudea. Architecture of Mesopotamia. Sumerian cuneiform. Cylinder print. Art. Stele with the goddess Ishtar. Hero taming a lion.

“The culture of ancient civilizations” - Sumer is gradually declining. Ishtar Gate (VI century BC). The most ancient civilizations. Frieze with archers. Babylonian clay tablet depicting a map of the world. Ruins of the White Temple. Clay tablet from the library of Ashurbanipal. Copper sculptural head of King Sargon the Ancient. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon are one of the Seven Wonders of the World.

There are 11 presentations in total

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Tatiana's Aegean letter, Onegin's Aegean letter
- a group of related scripts of original origin. Originated on about. Crete during the Minoan civilization of the late 3rd - early. 2 thousand BC e. Later, the related writings of Cyprus also evolved from the Cretan writings, which lost a number of characteristics (ideograms and numbers), but retained the syllabic character of the writing.

• 1 History of the study
  • 1.1 Opening and decryption
  • 1.2 Second half of the 20th century.
  • 1.3 Modern stage
• 2 Composition
  • 2.1 Cretan scripts
  • 2.2 "Hieratic syllabary"
  • 2.3 Scripts of Cyprus and Levant
  • 2.4 Controversial and erroneous identification
  • 2.5 Later monuments and disappearance
• 3 Characteristics
• 4 Language
• 5 Researchers
  • 5.1 Early stage
  • 5.2 Second half of the 20th century
  • 5.3 Modern research
• 6 See also
• 7 Links
• 8 Notes
• 9 Literature

History of the study

Discovery and decryption

The Cypriot script has been known since the mid-19th century. The main decryption work was done by George Smith.

The writings of Crete were unknown until the end of the 19th century, when they were discovered by A. Evans. During his lifetime, Evans published only a small part of the inscriptions, hoping to decipher them himself.

Linear B was deciphered by M. Ventris and J. Chadwick in 1950. Its inscriptions are in Greek (see Mycenaean civilization) using numerous ideograms, as well as abbreviations in the Minoan language. With their help, it was possible to partially read the inscriptions made by earlier types of writing, but not to understand them - the language of the linear A inscriptions and “hieroglyphic” inscriptions (see Eteocritan language) has not been deciphered to this day. The Cypro-Minoan script and Cretan hieroglyphs have been studied even less well, where we can speak with relative confidence about reading no more than 20-30 characters for each type of script.

Second half of the 20th century

Modern stage

Compound

Cretan scripts

• Cretan hieroglyphs:
  • - “Hieroglyphs A” (appearance - purely pictorial signs)
  • - “Hieroglyphs B” (simplified drawings, developed into Linear A)
• - Linear A (the characters have mostly lost their resemblance to the original drawings)
• - Linear B (further development of Linear A) - in addition to Crete, it was widespread in most cultural centers of the Mycenaean civilization

Although the form of the signs has changed greatly over the specified period, the composition of the signs and their meanings have not undergone fundamental changes, therefore the indicated writings can be considered as chronological variants of the same writing - the Cretan script.

Inscriptions in “hieroglyphs” represent administrative seals, while in linear writing - accounting and economic texts, markings of personal belongings and, probably, dedicatory inscriptions on objects. Linear B was used to write Greek, with the inclusion of isolated abbreviations and words in the Minoan language (usually as ideogram notes), the language of the other Cretan scripts is unknown and is conventionally designated as "Minoan" (presumably identical to the "Kefti" language, fragments of which are attested in Egyptian texts, and/or the “Eteocritan” language of some Greek inscriptions from antiquity).

"Hieratic Syllabary"

In Crete, several inscriptions were found in a special script, not similar to any of the above - the Phaistos disk and the ax from Arkalochori. Some researchers consider them as a special graphic version of the Cretan letter, others consider them as a completely original or even non-Cretan letter in origin. A. A. Molchanov proposed the term “hieratic syllabary” (that is, syllabic writing for religious, rather than economic and administrative purposes).

Scripts of Cyprus and the Levant

From Linear A also comes the so-called Cypro-Minoan letter (not deciphered), from which the Cypriot letter later came (deciphered at the end of the 19th century thanks to a bilingual inscription, used to write texts in a dialect of Greek, as well as in the local eteo-Cypriot language) .

A number of inscriptions from the 12th to 11th centuries have been discovered in Israel. BC e., conventionally called “Philistine”, which in style also resembles the Cypro-Minoan letter.

Controversial and Misidentification

Trojan script is externally indistinguishable from Linear A; the term was coined due to the erroneous dating of inscriptions, which (due to the mixing of archaeological layers during excavations) were attributed to the period before the emergence of writing in Crete.

H. J. Franken discovered in 1964 and attributed several tablets from Deir Alla (Levant) to the writings of the Minoan circle (his opinion was repeated by a number of other researchers, in particular, Trude Dotan and Margalit Finkelberg). Most researchers, however, classify these inscriptions as examples of Proto-Canaanite writing. Later, several mutually exclusive attempts were made to interpret the inscriptions in Semitic languages.

Later monuments and disappearance

Monuments of Cretan writing for the period of the XV-III centuries. BC e. have not reached us, probably due to the fact that they were made on short-lived materials, primarily leather (indirect evidence is the form of the Linear characters A and B, adapted for writing with ink rather than on stone or clay; there are inscriptions in ink on vessels ). However, in an Eteocritan inscription in the Greek alphabet from Psychro III (?) century. BC e. the word επιθι is duplicated in Cretan Linear A characters as i-pi-ti.

A tablet with an inscription in Cypro-Minoan script.

Characteristic

Mixed character:

• about 80-90 syllabic marks such as “vowel” or “consonant+vowel”
• several hundred ideograms (not attested in any of the scripts of Cyprus)
• original Aegean numerals (not attested in Cypriot script)

Language

Inscriptions in hieroglyphs and Linear A are only legible in fragments, so it is currently impossible to determine how much their language changed as the writing system changed. The Trojan script appears to be an imported Linear A text rather than a native script.

The Phaistos disc has not been deciphered, but according to its structural characteristics, according to G. Neumann, its language could be the same as the language of Linear A. At first glance, the text of the ax from Arkalochori has the same characteristics.

The Linear B inscriptions are written in Greek, but this writing system is characterized by a number of features that are completely alien to the Greek language, but apparently reflect the morphological phenomena of the language for which the Cretan letter was originally created:

• voiced and voiceless consonants were not distinguished (perhaps in the Eteocritan language they alternated during inflection)
• the consonants l, m, n, r, s at the end of closed syllables were not displayed in writing; to other consonants at the end of closed syllables, the “empty” vowel of the subsequent syllable was added (for example, Ko-no-so = Knossos).

The language of the Cypro-Minoan letter, apparently, has nothing in common with the languages ​​of Crete, since the letter was borrowed by speakers of a completely different, unrelated culture.

The Cypriot script was mainly used for the Greek language, but the few inscriptions in the south of the island are in the Eteocypriot language, the ancestry of which is unknown.

Researchers

Early stage

• Arthur Evans - discoverer of Cretan writing
• Bedřich the Terrible - proposed the first (unsuccessful) decipherment of the Cretan script based on a comparison of sign shapes with other scripts
• Johannes Sundvall and Axel Persson - authors of early works on the analysis of Cretan inscriptions
• John Franklin Daniel - the rationale for the relationship between the scripts of Cyprus and Crete
• Ernst Sittig - an unsuccessful attempt at decryption based on a statistical method
• Vladimir Georgiev - substantiated the Greek nature of the inscriptions with Linear B, but an attempt at decipherment based on the comparative method was unsuccessful
• Alice Kober - archaeologist, long before the decipherment of the letter, managed to identify a system of nominal declensions in inscriptions written in Linear B
• Michael Ventris - based on Kober's results, as well as the logical-mathematical method, roughly deciphered Linear B
• John Chadwick - completed the decipherment of Linear B, reconstructed the grammar of the Mycenaean dialect
• Solomon Lurie - thanks to his efforts, Mycenology became widespread in the USSR; noted and supported the decryption of Ventris

Second half of the 20th century

• Günter Neumann, Giovanni Pugliese Carratelli, Emilia Masson, Fritz Schachermayr, Emilio Peruzzi, Alfred Heubeck - the first analytical works on Linear A inscriptions
• Maurice Pope - systematized and published a corpus of Linear A inscriptions, established various forms of writing signs
• Cyrus Gordon, Ian Best - failed attempts to interpret Minoan inscriptions based on comparisons with Semitic languages
• Alexander Kondratov - machine processing of inscriptions in Cretan script
• Arkady Molchanov - analytical works on the Minoan language and linear B inscriptions, translated a number of words from ancient inscriptions in Cretan hieroglyphs
• David Woodley Packard - conducted a computer analysis of texts by Linear A, which made it possible to identify morphology and other patterns of language

Modern research

• John Younger - continually updates an online database of Linear A and Cretan hieroglyphs with grammatical commentary
• András Zeke - wrote a blog about the study of Linear A texts
• Margalit Finkelberg - explores Aegean scripts in the context of the history of the ancient Mediterranean
• Jörg Weilgartner
• Oksana Levitsky (France)

At the beginning of the 21st century. Most research on Aegean scripts is concentrated in Oxford, where seminars and conferences on these topics regularly take place (see, for example,).

A number of magazines dedicated to texts in the Aegean script are published. The earliest are Minos (since the 1960s, mainly devoted to the problems of Linear B), Kadmos (mainly pre-Greek inscriptions), Do-so-mo (began publishing in the 21st century).

see also

• Eteocritan language
• Linear A
• Linear B
• Cypro-Minoan letter
• Cretan hieroglyphs
• Trojan letter
• Aegean numbers

Links

• Cretan writings of the 2nd millennium BC. e.
• Neumann G. About the language of Cretan Linear A
• Pope M. Linear A and the problem of Aegean writing
• Linear A (in English)
• Linear B (in English)

Notes

1. Aegean Linear Scripts: perspectives and retrospectives Union académique internationale. Quatre-vingt-cinquième session annuelle du Comité. Compte rendu (Brussels 2011) 29-44. ...
2. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1516435?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
3. https://faculty.gordon.edu/hu/bi/ted_hildebrandt/otesources/02-exodus/text/articles/shea-tabletdeiralla1-auss.pdf
4. http://www.auss.info/auss_publication_file.php?pub_id=791
5. The Wadi el-Hol Translation: The Deir Alla Corpus

Literature

• Bartonek A. Gold-abundant Mycenae. M. 1991.
• Gelb I. E. Experience in studying writing. M. 1984.
• Kondratov A. M., Shevoroshkin V. V. When writing is silent. Mysteries of the ancient Aegean. M. 1970.
• Molchanov A. A. Mysterious writings of the first Europeans. M. 1980.
• Molchanov A. A., Neroznak V. P., Sharypkin S. Ya. Monuments of ancient Greek writing. Introduction to Mycenology. M., 1988
• Secrets of ancient letters. Decryption problems. M. 1975.

Aegean letter to grandfather, Aegean letter to a friend, Aegean letter from Onegin, Aegean letter from Tatiana

Aegean Letter Information About

2. How the mystery of Egyptian hieroglyphs was solved. On July 15, 1799, a group of French soldiers under the command of Captain Pierre-François Bouchard, during the construction of Fort Saint-Julien near the city of Rosetta, discovered a stone slab with three identical texts engraved on it (two texts in ancient Egyptian and one in ancient Greek. Rosetta Stone. Since 1802, it has been kept in the British Museum. Many scientists have struggled to solve them. Who managed to do it?

Jean-François Champollion made a breakthrough in science on September 14, 1822, making sure that he could read and translate any ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic texts. Thanks to him, scientists today can read ancient Egyptian texts and solve more and more riddles.

3. The school trained scribes and priests. In an ancient Egyptian school. Relief from the tomb School tuition was paid, and only wealthy Egyptians could afford to educate their children. Only boys attended school. The duration of training was long (from 5 to 17 years). The main goal of the training was to prepare officials who knew writing and mathematical calculations.

Teaching writing What can be said about the teaching methods in the Egyptian school? The motto of the Egyptian school was the words recorded in one of the ancient papyri: “The child carries his ear on his back, you need to beat him so that he hears.” At first, the students wrote on shards of broken dishes. And only older students who were already good at the art of writing were trusted with papyrus.

Areas of knowledge of the ancient Egyptians: Mathematics: They created their own simple number system, knew how to multiply and divide, and calculate the area of ​​figures. Chemistry: We made embalming compounds, used various mineral and organic additives to color raw materials, and learned how to make glass. Astronomy: They created a map of the starry sky visible in Egypt, compiled a calendar, and were able to determine when the Nile flood would begin. A water clock was used to measure time. Medicine: The Egyptians knew large organs: the heart, blood vessels, kidneys, intestines, muscles, etc. They were the first to describe the brain. They knew several hundred medicinal plants. When treating fractures, Egyptian healers used wooden splints or bandaged the damaged limb with linen cloth soaked in hardening resin.

Aegean script is a group of related scripts of original origin. Originated on about. Crete during the end of the Minoan civilization
3 - beginning 2 thousand BC e. Later from
Cretan writings originated
also related scripts of Cyprus,
have lost a number of characteristics
(ideograms and numbers), but retained
syllabic character of the letter.

Cretan hieroglyphs - central and eastern parts of Crete: “Archanesian letter” (the most ancient stage, the final pre-palace

Discovery and decipherment The Cyprus letter has been known since the mid-19th century. The main decryption work was done by George Smith.

Language. The inscriptions in hieroglyphs and Linear A are readable only in fragments, so it is currently impossible to determine

Later monuments and disappearance In the Eteocritan inscription in the Greek alphabet from Psychro III, the word επιθι is duplicated in Cretan

DECORDING OF THE “PHAESTUS DISC” / Y. A. YARALIEV

CHAPTER II

Creto-Mycenaean writing

The first archaeological research in Crete was carried out in 1876, when a local resident, the namesake of the legendary Cretan king, Minos Kalokerinos, partially excavated the ruins of a huge building near the city of Heraklion, in which the American scientist William Stillman recognized the famous Knossos labyrinth in 1884 /37/ . Since 1884, an expedition of Italian archaeologists began working on the southern coast of Crete. Of particular importance were the many years of excavations of the grandiose palace in Knossos, which from 1900 to 1930 were carried out by the outstanding English scientist Arthur Evans. In 1935, he completed the publication of his major work, which laid the foundations for the periodization of Bronze Age Cretan culture /38/.

Archaeological finds show that the Balkan massif of pre-Greek tribes created their own independent writing almost at the same time as the Sumerians in Mesopotamia, whose oldest writing is known in the middle of the 4th millennium BC. As for the Egyptian pictographic system, created in the second half of the 4th millennium BC, it is contemporaneous with the Balkan pictography. Thus, the long-outdated hypothesis about the appearance of writing in ancient Greece under the influence of Egypt is finally eliminated / 10, p. 114/.

In layers dating back to the beginning of the 3rd millennium BC, seals covered with drawings and symbols were found. Later, more complex combinations appear - from two or more symbols-drawings. All of these are undoubtedly pictograms. In Lerna, Tiryns and Zigouries, impressions of the same seal with a spiral design were found. Monuments of this phase of writing have been found in many places on Crete, but particularly important are the inscriptions discovered at Phaistos in the “Ancient Palace” layer, dating from 1900-1700. BC. But on later seals there are no longer just drawings, but signs that convey words or parts of words. And even later, writing was streamlined and brought into a system, and a new principle of using signs was introduced: pictograms, which previously denoted entire individual words (concepts), acquired the meaning of only the initial syllables of these words. Thus, a syllabary arose, usually called a syllabary. Over time, some of the logographic-verbal signs began to be used as syllabic signs - syllabograms, using the so-called “acrophonic” principle, i.e. using

The initial syllable of a given word. By analogy with them, signs were then selected to convey all other syllables found in the language of the ancient inhabitants of Crete - the “Minoans” (Pelasgians).

Then “Linear A” appears, which ceases to be used at the end of the Late Minoan period, i.e. around the middle of the 15th century. BC. This occurs simultaneously with the collapse of the pre-Greek Cretan civilization itself, which is associated with the consequences of a natural disaster - a catastrophic volcanic eruption around 1450 BC. on the island of Thera (modern Santorini) 110 km north of Crete (according to the Greek archaeologist S. Marinatos) or with the death of the legendary Atlantis, accompanied by a destructive earthquake, tsunami and the fall of a thick layer of ash, and with the invasion of Crete from the Greek mainland - Achaeans. Since the alien language (Greek) had now become dominant in Crete, they switched to using “Linear B,” adapted for it, to compile economic reporting documents.

As has been pointed out repeatedly, the presence of a pre-Indo-European linguistic layer in the south of the Balkan Peninsula (including Crete and other islands of the Aegean Sea) can no longer raise any doubts. Ancient linguistic Balkan studies came to establish this fact in two different ways. On the one hand, as a result of a consistent analysis of the substrate pre-Greek vocabulary of this region, for some of which Indo-European etymologies are clearly absent, a special group of languages ​​is identified, united under the common conventional name “Aegean”. On the other hand, the reading of the Cretan texts of “Linear A” (after deciphering the related “Linear B”), although it did not lead to a complete interpretation of their content, still made it possible to get some idea about their language, which received the conventional name “Minoan”.

There is linguistic, archaeological and historical evidence for the complex, multi-ethnic composition of the population of Crete during the Early and Middle Minoan periods, which included at least three components: Minoan, Pelasgian and Anatolian. Only after the addition around the 16th century. BC. A common Cretan Minoan language could finally take shape under a unified Knossos power. It was based on the Early Minoan language of the 3rd millennium BC, which absorbed elements of other languages ​​it defeated in Crete /39/. Clarifying the relationship between the language of its creators - “Minoan” and “Aegean” is one of the most pressing problems for linguistic minoistics.

The ancient inhabitants of Crete wrote their letters on clay tablets, on household pottery utensils, on walls, on leather, and on palm leaves /41/. Naturally, those that were written on clay have reached us. These are either clay tablets, square or palm leaf shaped, most of which (168 out of a total of 220 according to /41/) were found in Agia Triada, or inscriptions on vessels. The inscriptions consisted not only of signs denoting syllables, but also ideograms - signs, words and concepts (animal, person, etc.) that explained the syllabic spelling that preceded them.

In Cretan hieroglyphs, a strictly defined direction of writing was not accepted: hieroglyphs were written from top to bottom, right to left and left to right /37/. A fairly common way of writing hieroglyphic texts was the one that the ancient Greeks later called “boustrophedon” (“how oxen walk in arable land”). It is characterized by turning each subsequent line in the opposite direction, which is why the inscription runs like a “snake”. A spiral arrangement of inscription tape is also often found.

Evans showed that of the other writing systems of Crete in the 2nd millennium BC, the so-called “Linear A” was directly derived from hieroglyphics. He managed to unravel the system of numerical notations developed by the Minoans, the creators of Cretan hieroglyphics and Linear A. This system was decimal and included separate digits only to indicate the numbers I (vertical line), 10 (horizontal line), 100 (circle), 1000 (circle with four rays diverging in different directions), 10000 (circle with four rays diverging in different directions and horizontal line inside it), with the help of which all other numbers were transmitted. Not only could they add, subtract, divide, and multiply whole numbers, but they also knew fractions and could calculate percentages.

For a long time, the Cretans founded their colonies on the island of Cyprus. And here, already in the Bronze Age, as A. Evans established, a special type of writing arose, called Cypro-Minoan (“Cypriot” branch of Linear A). The texts of the Cypro-Minoan letter have not yet been read. The total number of characters in it is slightly more than 50. And this suggests that the oldest letter of Cyprus was syllabic (perhaps it also had determiners, as in linear A and B). The Greeks who settled in Cyprus reformed these letters. There are no determiners, much less logograms in the Cypriot letter; it is a purely phonetic system. Only, unlike the alphabetic recording system, its signs convey not sounds, but syllables.

Thus, Cretan archaeological epigraphy includes: a) “picture marks” on seals, whose age is 40-45 centuries BC. and the late inscription on the “Phaistos Disc”, in its form a stamped letter, which dates back to the last phase of the Middle Minoan period (XVII-XVI centuries BC); b) Linear A, which continues to exist in the 16th century. (and even in the 15th century /41/) BC; c) Linear B of the early Greek period, i.e. this letter dates back to around 1400 BC.

Some tablets, written in Linear A by the island's indigenous inhabitants, date back to the 19th century. BC. /42/.In Linear A there are 80 characters, and in its late Greek version, Linear B, there are 89. All these characters represent open syllables: either a “pure vowel” (G) or “consonant and vowel” (SG). Some signs in linear B even convey a syllable consisting of two consonants + a vowel sound (SSG). Linear A and B have 55 characters in common; 5 characters of linear A have no correspondence in linear B, and 10 characters of linear B have no correspondence in linear A.

Researchers established the phonetic significance of linear syllabic signs on the basis of the following principles /43, p. 11-13/.

1. Identity or similarity with the signs of the Cypriot syllabary.
2. Identity or similarity with Phoenician-Greek-Etruscan letters.
3. Combinatorial considerations based on data from the inscription.
4. Logography, i.e. the identity of the phonetic significance of the sign with the word denoting an object expressed using a pictogram. Acrophonic method, i.e. the identity of the phonetic significance of the sign with the initial syllable of the word denoting an object expressed using a pictogram (ideogram).
5. Combinatorial etymological considerations.
6. Convergence of opinions among experts regarding the phonetic significance of signs.

Based on the fact that the ancient inhabitants of the Aegean Sea of ​​Asia Minor, Sicily, Italy, Spain, France did not speak languages ​​of the Indo-European group /44, p. 157/, linguists-decipherers believed that when trying to read ancient inscriptions from the island of Crete, one should proceed from the fact that this language could be anything, but not “Aryan”, and certainly not Greek. After all, it was the Achaean Greeks who defeated the civilization of Crete and Mycenae.

It should be noted that the Cretan hieroglyphic writing on seals and on clay tablets has not yet been read by any scientist in the world. Firstly, the hieroglyphic texts are very short - a few characters, and secondly, the texts themselves are few and, therefore, the set of Cretan characters is also small - there are less than 150 of them. It is not yet known in what language these texts should be read.

In 1931, an attempt was made to read the Cretan-Mycenaean writings using the language of the Basque inhabitants of the Iberian Peninsula. Later, other non-Indo-European languages ​​were also used, with the help of which decipherers wanted to read the mysterious texts, but all these attempts were unsuccessful. The Czech scientist B. Grozny made an attempt in 1949 to read the Cretan-Mycenaean signs, comparing them with the signs of the Hittites, Sumerians, inhabitants of the Indus Valley, Phoenicians, and ancient Cypriots; however, it did not lead to success. In fact, Ivan the Terrible developed a very strange language: it mixed a wide variety of elements. The content of the texts, read by Ivan the Terrible from the tablets, was devoid of clear meaning. In 1943-1950 American mathematician Alice Kober conducted research on the mysterious writings of Mycenae and Crete from a new angle: by compiling a table of stable combinations of characters, she was able to discover endings for the masculine and feminine gender, as well as establish grammatical endings. But she could not read a single word or even a syllable with complete confidence.

In 1951, the young English architect Michael Ventris continued his research on Alice Kober. Based on calculations of the repetition of signs and combinations of one sign with another, skillfully using the achievements of other researchers, Ventris managed to create a “grid”; out of 88 different characters, 66 fell into the “grid”. Careful research by Ventris showed that the Greek language fits perfectly into the “grid”, although many of the resulting words sounded strange, because the language in which they were written was several hundred years older than Homeric.

Thus, after lengthy searches, guesses and assumptions, M. Ventris, in collaboration with Jones Chadwick, a specialist in ancient Greek dialects, was able to convincingly prove that the language of the Cretan-Mycenaean inscriptions written in Linear B is Greek /45/. Based on the age of the inscriptions, it is assumed that the Greeks settled in Greece quite early - XIV-XIII centuries BC. According to experts, the decipherment of Linear B is the initial basis for an attack on Linear A, Cypro-Minoan and the ancient Cypriot script. Indeed, the decipherment of the letter carried out by M. Ventris not only made it possible to read the most ancient Greek texts of the second half of the 2nd millennium BC, but also created the basis for a fruitful study of the written monuments of the Aegean period of the pre-Greek period.

Based on the fact that many of the characters in Linear A and B are the same, one can read almost all texts written in Linear A without understanding almost anything. It is important that linear B contains several Minoan words (the same as linear A; apparently, names or place names). Such parallels support the conclusion that the signs of linear A and linear B were read the same way.

It is not possible to complete the decipherment of Linear A texts composed in the “Minoan” language, primarily due to the fact that the relationship of this language with any other known language has not been proven. All attempts to read in Greek (as in the case of Linear B) the texts of Linear A were unsuccessful. P. Kretschmer (on /46/) in a solid monograph published in 1896, proved that the ancient population of the Aegean spoke a language that had nothing in common with Greek and in general with the Indo-European family. Later, the Bulgarian academician V. Georgiev puts forward another theory: the Pelasgians were not Greeks, but they spoke a language that goes back to the Indo-European base language /47/ (see below for details).

However, a large amount of evidence argues against the hypothesis about the Indo-European character of the Minoan language. According to the author /48/, V. Georgiev’s thesis that there has never been a non-Indo-European population in Greece at all seems very strange, and his desire to give all pre-Greek onomastics Indo-European etymologies looks extremely unconvincing. In general, V. Georgiev’s statements regarding the genetic connections between individual ancient languages ​​of the Balkans, Aegean and Asia Minor can be quite difficult to understand. Moreover, referring to different, and sometimes even to the same time, completely different statements are usually made in the same categorical form.

“The fact is that linear writing consists of two types of syllabic signs. Some signs convey G (vowel sounds), others - SG (a combination of a consonant and a vowel). This means that the creators of Linear writing spoke a language that differed from Indo-European in its syllabic structure. In Indo-European languages, there are often words in which two or more consonants are located next to each other, and many words begin with two or three consonants” /49/. The Cretan linear writing is not suitable for transmitting a language with consonantal groups: we encounter a regular alternation of consonants and vowels, which is completely adequately conveyed by syllabic writing and for which “the Cretan linear writing seems to have been created” /50, p.99/. It is the nature of the phonetic structure (SGSGSG) of the pre-Greek Cretan language that should help the successful application of the etymological method for the complete decipherment and interpretation of documents of linear A. In this case, according to A.A. Molchanov /51/, great attention should be paid to the probable similarity of the Minoan language with pre-Indo-European substrate languages ​​of Asia Minor and related ones.