Posted on 08/28/2015 5:10:40 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Ongoing excavations at a site in the southern Peloponnese are offering rare insight into the ancient past of Laconia, about which very little physical evidence exists, the state-run Athens-Macedonian News Agency cited the Culture Ministry as saying on Tuesday.
Covering an expanse of 3.5 hectares, the site on Aghios Vassilios Hill near the village of Xirokambi on the Sparta plain has been under excavation since 2009 and is believed to contain valuable evidence that will shed light on life in the area during the 17th to 16th centuries BC, the announcement said.
A palace complex found on the site and dated to the Mycenaean era is believed to have been razed by fire in the late 15th or early 14th century BC, which destroyed several buildings but preserved Linear B tablets and seals constructed of unbaked clay.
A number of these artifacts were discovered in what is believed to have been the palaceâs archive, which also contains records of commercial transactions, offerings to a sanctuary, male and female names, as well as place names â pointing to a highly organized and sophisticated bureaucracy.
The fire that destroyed the complex is also believed to have preserved a sanctuary, which has yielded valuable evidence such as clay and ivory idols, decorative objects and 21 bronze swords.
A second building found on the site contains fragments of murals, suggesting that the palaceâs more prominent structures were richly decorated, the Culture Ministry said in its briefing on ongoing excavations.
(Excerpt) Read more at ekathimerini.com ...
Linear A is Cretan. B is Mycenaean.
I have always been fascinated by Crete but for some reason, have never studied it seriously.
I am sure I saw fairly recently where one of the ancient Minoan written languages was finally deciphered. Do you happen to know which one?
For that matter does anyone know in brief terms where the various Cretan languages originated? Greek?
...is believed to have been razed by fire in the late 15th or early 14th century BC...IOW, they didn't do any scientific dating of the site. The Minoan civ was overthrown and replaced by Mycenaeans.
Linear A is Cretan. B is Mycenaean.Linear B is Greek; there's no concensus about Linear A, as it is undeciphered, and due to the current small sample size, it's been said that it's possible that it will never be deciphered. None of the claimed decipherments have caught on, I prefer Barry Fell's. Pre-Greek Crete was populated by Carians, it seems likely that Linear A is Carian, which is related to Hurrian.
A Proper Dating of the Linear B TabletsWhile there is general agreement that the language of the Linear B tablets was Greek, many words lack clear cut Greek etymologies and have not been satisfactorily translated. This has led to suggestions that the tablets may contain a sort of jargon combining several languages. I will demonstrate the equivalence of the Mycenaean terms ko-re-te, po-ko-re-te, e-qu-ta, and ra-wa-ke-ta [with] the Latin terms curator, procurator, equite, and legatus and discuss other evidence suggesting that Latin was included in the Linear B tablets. I am not disputing that Mycenaean is a Greek tongue; however, the scribes who prepared these tablets were also using, to a limited extent, certain Latin terms and constructions.
by Jesse E. Lasken
ESOP 1993 v 22
Lasken seems to be onto something here. He claims that some Linear B tablets contain Latin terms, and must date after circa 207 BC. This is not to say that they all must, nor does it take into account the fact that Latin is older than this and the loan vocabulary could have resulted from the extensive commerce, but not so much older that the existence of the Greek Dark Age isn't shown to be imaginary. :') The older editions of the Dartmouth paper just mentions a couple of these as suspicious, but offers no critique of it.
This topic was posted , thanks me.
One of *those* topics.
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