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Eteocretan
Eteocretan ( from grc-gre, Ἐτεόκρητες, Eteókrētes, lit. "true Cretans", itself composed from ἐτεός ''eteós'' "true" and Κρής ''Krḗs'' "Cretan") is the pre-Greek language attested in a few alphabetic inscriptions of ancient Crete. In eastern Crete, about half a dozen inscriptions have been found, which, though written in Greek alphabets, are clearly not Greek. These inscriptions date from the late 7th or early 6th century down to the 3rd century BC. The language, which so far cannot be translated, is probably a survival of a language spoken on Crete before the arrival of proto-Greek language and is probably derived from the Minoan language preserved in the Linear A inscriptions of a millennium earlier. Since that language remains undeciphered, it is not certain that Eteocretan and Minoan are related, although this is very likely. Ancient testimony suggests that the language is that of the Eteocretans, i.e. "true Cretans". The term ''Eteocretan'' is some ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tyrsenian Languages
Tyrsenian (also Tyrrhenian or Common Tyrrhenic), named after the Tyrrhenians (Ancient Greek, Ionic: ''Tyrsenoi''), is a proposed extinct family of closely related ancient languages put forward by linguist Helmut Rix (1998), which consists of the Etruscan language of northern, central and south-western Italy, and eastern Corsica (France); the Rhaetic language of the Alps, named after the Rhaetian people; and the Lemnian language of the Aegean Sea. Camunic in northern Lombardy, in between Etruscan and Rhaetic, may belong here too, but the material is very scant. The Tyrsenian languages are generally considered Pre-Indo-European and Paleo-European. Classification In 1998 the German linguist Helmut Rix proposed that three then unclassified ancient languages belonged to a common linguistic family he called ''Tyrrhenian'': the Etruscan language spoken in Etruria, the Rhaetic language of the southern Alps, and the Lemnian language, only attested by a small number of inscript ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dreros
Dreros ( grc, Δρῆρος), also (representing Modern Greek pronunciation) Driros, near Neapoli in the regional unit of Lasithi, Crete, is a post-Minoan archaeological site, 16 km northwest of Agios Nikolaos. Known only by a chance remark of the 9th-century Byzantine grammarian Theognostus (''De orthographia''), archaeology of the site shows Dreros to have been initially colonised by mainland Greeks in the early Archaic Period about the same time as Lato and Prinias. Archaeology The early Iron Age site, first excavated in 1917, was most prosperous in the 8th–6th centuries BCE; later it became a minor satellite of Knossos and continued to be occupied into the Byzantine period. It comprises two acropoleis with an Archaic-period agora between them. Almost the whole of the city and its necropolis have been excavated, confirming that this is a post-Minoan Greek habitation; its inscriptions are in Dorian dialect. Traces of fortifications have been discovered. Ther ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Praisos
Praesus or Praisos ( grc, Πραῖσος), also Prasus or Prasos (Πρᾶσος), was a Greek city in ancient Crete. Strabo reports that it belonged to the Eteocretes, and contained the temple of the Dictaean Zeus, for Mount Dicte was in the territory of Praesus. Strabo reports that Praesus was located between as lying between the promontories Samonium and Chersonesus, at the distance of 60 stadia from the sea, and close to Mount Dicte. However, Strabo confuses Praesus with Priansus, when he says it bordered upon the territory of Leben, and was distant 70 stadia from the sea, and 180 from Gortyn. The site was populated in Neolithic times, and remnants of Minoan and Mycenaean settlements have also been found. The inhabitants of Praesus believed that the Kouretes were children of Athena and Helios. The city was razed by the inhabitants of Hierapytna in 140 BCE, in a war that pitted Gortyn and Hierapytna against Cnossus and its allies. Praesus was mentioned by Theophrastu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lemnian Language
The Lemnian language was spoken on the island of Lemnos, Greece, in the second half of the 6th century BC. It is mainly attested by an inscription found on a funerary stele, termed the Lemnos stele, discovered in 1885 near Kaminia, Lemnos, Kaminia. Fragments of inscriptions on local pottery show that it was spoken there by a community. In 2009, a newly discovered inscription was reported from the site of Hephaistia, the principal ancient city of Lemnos. Lemnian is largely accepted as being a Tyrsenian language, and as such related to Etruscan language, Etruscan and Rhaetic language, Rhaetic. After the Athenians conquered the island in the latter half of the 6th century BC, Lemnian was replaced by Attic Greek. Writing system The Lemnian inscriptions are in Western Greek alphabet, also called "red alphabet". The red type is found in most parts of central and northern mainland Greece (Thessaly, Boeotia and most of the Peloponnese), as well as the island of Euboea, and in colonies ass ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pre-Greek
The Pre-Greek substrate (or Pre-Greek substratum) consists of the unknown pre-Indo-European language(s) spoken in prehistoric Greece before the coming of the Proto-Greek language in the Greek peninsula during the Bronze Age. It is possible that Greek acquired approximately one thousand words and proper names from such a language or group of languages, because some of its vocabulary cannot be satisfactorily explained as deriving from Proto-Greek and a Proto-Indo-European reconstruction is almost certainly impossible for such terms. Introduction Linguistic situation Based upon toponymic and lexical evidence, it is generally assumed that one or several languages were once spoken in both the Greek peninsula and western Asia Minor before Mycenaean Greek and the attested Anatolian languages ( Hittite and Luwian) became predominant in the region. Various explanations for this phenomenon have been given by scholars. One substrate language, whose influence is observable on Ancient Gre ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Crete
Crete ( el, Κρήτη, translit=, Modern: , Ancient: ) is the largest and most populous of the Greek islands, the 88th largest island in the world and the fifth largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, after Sicily, Sardinia, Cyprus, and Corsica. Crete rests about south of the Greek mainland, and about southwest of Anatolia. Crete has an area of and a coastline of 1,046 km (650 mi). It bounds the southern border of the Aegean Sea, with the Sea of Crete (or North Cretan Sea) to the north and the Libyan Sea (or South Cretan Sea) to the south. Crete and a number of islands and islets that surround it constitute the Region of Crete ( el, Περιφέρεια Κρήτης, links=no), which is the southernmost of the 13 top-level administrative units of Greece, and the fifth most populous of Greece's regions. Its capital and largest city is Heraklion, on the north shore of the island. , the region had a population of 636,504. The Dodecanese are located to the no ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dorians
The Dorians (; el, Δωριεῖς, ''Dōrieîs'', singular , ''Dōrieús'') were one of the four major ethnic groups into which the Hellenes (or Greeks) of Classical Greece divided themselves (along with the Aeolians, Achaeans, and Ionians). They are almost always referred to as just "the Dorians", as they are called in the earliest literary mention of them in the ''Odyssey'', where they already can be found inhabiting the island of Crete. They were diverse in way of life and social organization, varying from the populous trade center of the city of Corinth, known for its ornate style in art and architecture, to the isolationist, military state of Sparta. And yet, all Hellenes knew which localities were Dorian, and which were not. Dorian states at war could more likely, but not always, count on the assistance of other Dorian states. Dorians were distinguished by the Doric Greek dialect and by characteristic social and historical traditions. In the 5th century BC, Dorians an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
History Of The Greek Alphabet
The history of the Greek alphabet starts with the adoption of Phoenician letter forms in the 9th–8th centuries BC during early Archaic Greece and continues to the present day. The Greek alphabet was developed during the Iron Age centuries after the loss of Linear B, the syllabic script that was used for writing Mycenaean Greek until the Late Bronze Age collapse and Greek Dark Age. This article concentrates on the development of the alphabet before the modern codification of the standard Greek alphabet. The Phoenician alphabet was strictly speaking one that was consistently explicit only about consonants, though even by the 9th century BC it had developed '' matres lectionis'' to indicate some, mostly final, vowels. This arrangement is much less suitable for Greek than for Semitic languages, and these ''matres lectionis'', as well as several Phoenician letters which represented consonants not present in Greek, were adapted according to the acrophonic principle to represent ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Minoan Language
The Minoan language is the language (or languages) of the ancient Minoan civilization of Crete written in the Cretan hieroglyphs and later in the Linear A syllabary. As the Cretan hieroglyphs are undeciphered and Linear A only partly deciphered, the Minoan language is unknown and unclassified: indeed, with the existing evidence, it is impossible to be certain that the two scripts record the same language. The Eteocretan language, attested in a few alphabetic inscriptions from Crete 1,000 years later, is possibly a descendant of Minoan, but is also unclassified. Tradition Minoan is mainly known from the inscriptions in Linear A, which are fairly legible by comparison with Linear B. The Cretan hieroglyphs are dated from the first half of the 2nd millennium BC. The Linear A texts, mostly written in clay tablets, are spread all over Crete with more than 40 localities on the island. The Egyptian texts From the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt there are four texts containing names and sa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Linear A
Linear A is a writing system that was used by the Minoans of Crete from 1800 to 1450 BC to write the hypothesized Minoan language or languages. Linear A was the primary script used in palace and religious writings of the Minoan civilization. It was succeeded by Linear B, which was used by the Mycenaeans to write an early form of Greek. It was discovered by archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans. No texts in Linear A have yet been deciphered. The term ''linear'' refers to the fact that the script was written using a stylus to cut ''lines'' into a tablet of clay, as opposed to cuneiform, which was written by using a stylus to press ''wedges'' into the clay. Linear A belongs to the group of scripts that evolved independently of the Egyptian and Mesopotamian systems. During the second millennium BC, there were four major branches: Linear A, Linear B, Cypro-Minoan, and Cretan hieroglyphic. In the 1950s, Linear B was deciphered as Mycenaean Greek. Linear B shares many ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cretan Hieroglyphs
Cretan hieroglyphs are a hieroglyphic writing system used in early Bronze Age Crete, during the Minoan era. They predate Linear A by about a century, but the two writing systems continued to be used in parallel for most of their history. , they are undeciphered. Corpus As of 1989, the corpus of Cretan hieroglyphic inscriptions included two parts: * Seals and sealings, 150 documents with 307 sign-groups, using 832 signs in all. * Other documents on clay, 120 documents with 274 sign-groups, using 723 signs. More documents, such as those from the Petras deposit, have been published since then. A four sided prism was found in 2011 at Vrysinas in western Crete. These inscriptions were mainly excavated at four locations: *"Quartier Mu" at Malia ( Middle Minoan II period = MM II) *Malia palace (MM III) *Knossos (MM II or III) *the Petras deposit (MM IIB), excavated starting in 1995 and published in 2010. The first corpus of signs was published by Evans in 1909. The current corpus ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Achaeans (Homer)
The Achaeans (; grc, Ἀχαιοί ''Akhaioí,'' "the Achaeans" or "of Achaea") is one of the names in Homer which is used to refer to the Greeks collectively. The term "Achaean" is believed to be related to the Hittite term Ahhiyawa and the Egyptian term Ekwesh which appear in texts from the Late Bronze Age and are believed to refer to the Mycenaean civilization or some part of it. In the historical period, the term fell into disuse as a general term for Greek people, and was generally reserved for inhabitants of the region of Achaea, a region in the north-central part of the Peloponnese. The city-states of this region later formed a confederation known as the Achaean League, which was influential during the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC. Etymology According to Margalit Finkelberg, the name Ἀχαιοί/Ἀχαιϝοί is derived from Hittite ''Aḫḫiyawā''. However, Robert S. P. Beekes doubted the validity of this derivation and suggested a Pre-Greek proto-form ''*Akayw ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
