The Minoans were Caucasian

Daily Mail (UK) ^ | 5-16-2013 | Damien Gayle

[Renfield]

DNA analysis has debunked the longstanding theory that the Minoans, who some 5,000 years ago established Europe's first advanced Bronze Age culture, were from Africa.

The Minoan civilisation arose on the Mediterranean island of Crete in approximately the 27th century BC and flourished for 12 centuries until the 15th century BC.

But the culture was lost until British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans unearthed its remains on Crete in 1900, where he found vestiges of a civilisation he believed was formed by refugees from northern Egypt.

Modern archaeologists have cast doubt on that version of events, and now DNA tests of Minoan remains suggests they were descended from ancient farmers who settled the islands thousands of years earlier.

These people, it is believed, are from the same stock that came from the East to populate the rest of Europe....

[Jan_Sobieski]

Dr. Steven Collins is excavating what he believes is Sodom and Gamorrah in Jordan right now (just outside the Dead Sea). They are finding what they believe to be Minoan artifacts.

The Minoans, like sodom and Gamorah, practiced paderastria. History says that the Minoans were destroyed by a cataclysmic volcanic event, similar to Sodom and Gamorah.

[ought-six]

All I know about the Minoans is that their women went around bare-breasted. Now, that’s civilized!

[Jan_Sobieski]

Eurieka! Amazing resemblance!

[Yollopoliuhqui]

“The Baltic Origins of Homer’s Epic Tales” Felice Vinci

[bunkerhill7]

Actually the Minoans are descendants of Noah, hence the name” Mi-Noah, referring to the fact that everything aboard the Ark came aboard in twos, two snakes, two breasts etc., resulting in the memorial statuette thus displayed. I refuse to comment on her Cat On a Hat, tho.

[yarddog]

I think the Minoans came from Europe but it really doesn’t matter. North Africans were also Caucasian.

Crete has always fascinated me because no one really knows much about them from ancient times. The early Greeks clearly had Crete as dominating them for a long time then around the time of Agamemnon, the Mainland Greeks began to dominate the Aegean.

[Oratam]

No. 4 reminds me of a school girl carrying her books to class . . . right down to the pony-tail! I think I’m in love.

[Verginius Rufus]

Presumably if the Minoans and the Mycenaeans had spoken the same language, they would have used the same script.

The Minoan language clearly was not Greek, but what it was is still unknown. One theory is that it is Luwian (a language related to Hittite, spoken in Anatolia), but it could be a pre-Indo-European language (Hittite and Luwian belonged to a branch of the Indo-European language family).

The language spoken on mainland Greece in the third millennium B.C., before the arrival of the "Greek speakers," was probably the same or related to Minoan, since similar elements are found in place names on Crete and on the mainland and in non-Greek "loan words" that the Greeks borrowed from the previous inhabitants (such as -ss- or -nth- in words, such as Knossos, Tylissos, Parnassos, kyparissa [cypress], glossa, thalassa, Corinth, terebinthos, erebinthos). There are similar names in Asia Minor such as Halikarnassos and Ephesos.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks Renfield. I think a topic about this was posted a year or so ago, but anyway, here's a ping.

But the culture was lost until British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans unearthed its remains on Crete in 1900, where he found vestiges of a civilisation he believed was formed by refugees from northern Egypt.

Evans was an autocratic jackass who managed to destroy the first batch of inscribed tablets excavated at Knossos, and refused to publish 99 percent during his lifetime, insisting that they could NOT be in Greek (Linear B is in Greek; Linear A is not), and struggled to find another language, any other language. He failed. As noted in Lost Languages: The Enigma Of The World's Undeciphered Scripts Evans actually found a Greek word in one of the texts, discussed it, and used it as an example of how false translations creep in. In the reconstruction of Knossos he reproduced wall art based on either his imagination or then-current hair styles and fashions from the UK.

[SunkenCiv]

One of *those* topics.

The current version may not quite match, but I nabbed this off a post in one of the Minoan topics linked above.

The Prehistoric Archaeology of the Aegean
Lesson 18: The Nature and Extent of
Neopalatial Minoan Influence
in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean Worlds
Aegean Connections With Egypt
In The Amarna Period (ca. 1360-1340 B.C.)
Trustees of Dartmouth College
revised Friday, March 18, 2000

During the reign of the heretical pharoah Akhenaten (= Amenhotep IV), the capital of Egypt was moved downstream from Thebes to the new city of Akhetaten (= modern Tell el-Amarna). This city was only occupied from ca. 1352-1338 B.C., and the large quantities of Mycenaean pottery found within it are therefore supplied with a fairly precise absolute date. The almost complete absence of Minoan pottery at Amarna is one indication of Mycenaean mercantile dominance within the Aegean at this time. More significant is the Mycenaean character of the settlements which have by this time replaced sites characterized until the end of the LM IB period (ca. 1500 B.C.) by Minoan cultural remains at Trianda on Rhodes, Ayia Irini on Keos, Phylakopi on Melos, and Miletus and Iasos in Asia Minor.

join or quit view topics view or post blog bookmark post new topic subscribe

[SunkenCiv]

The Secret of Crete
by Hans Georg Wunderlich, Richard Winston (Translator)
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6483103-the-secret-of-crete

[ZULU]

Uhhh. North Africans like Berbers, Ancient Egyptians and Ancient Libyans were Caucasoid. The Black African element came later with Muslim slave traders.

[Varda]

I think the problem lay with the headline writer. He/she/it believes that if someone is African then they are not Caucasion. As others have said the North Africans are/were Caucasion and in anthropology that is not in dispute.

Nobody on the science side said anything about race. They are just saying the DNA shows an affinity with ancient near easterners of the same population that gave rise to later populations of europeans. Some had believed the Minoans had come from the same population that gave rise to the Egyptian civilization.

Read the paper here: A European population in Minoan Bronze Age Crete

[SunkenCiv]

Martin Bernal is responsible — his “theory”, seen in “Black Athena”, is analogous to the Face on Mars being artificial.

[Little Bill]

Minoan is probably related to Luvvian, going by the Glifts, there was a change in culture post 3000 BC.

[SunkenCiv]

I’ve been reading a book I bought used sometime in the past few years (probably, I didn’t check the receipt I’ve been using for a bookmark, it’s probably the date of purchase), regarding Mycenaean Greeks and their relationship to Homer (among other things). I’d started looking through the book piles for something else, found this, finally gave up on whatever else I was looking for.

Anyway, turns out that this was written in the 1930s, after Emil Forrer’s work on the Hattusas archive (Forrer found cuneiform records referring to the Achaens, and Alexander, another name for Paris in the Iliad), so, right on the cutting edge as it were. Evans had already done all the damage he was going to do, and Linear B hadn’t been cracked yet. Quite a good read so far, must have been still in use as a text book in the 1970s.

[SunkenCiv]

Lemnian stele (from Lemnos)

http://tyrsenoi.blogspot.com/2013/07/why-tyrsenoi.html

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks for that link!

http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v4/n5/pdf/ncomms2871.pdf

[norton]

Close but no cigar - Bombastic Bobby isn’t an albino.