Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Which dead language would you revive?
Minoan, the language spoken on the island of Crete, in the Mediterranean, early in the Bronze Age. It has just been deciphered by a very clever Frenchman, Hubert LaMarle, from hieroglyphic texts scratched into clay tablets. For a long time people thought it might be related to Phoenician, a Semitic language, or to Hittite, an Anatolian language spoken in what is now Turkey. It turns out that it was related to Persian! I want to know how the ancient Persians got all the way over to Crete so early in pre-history, when the first time they appear in actual history they are way over in Iran??? How mysterious! How amazing! They may have been the folks that Plato and Aristotle were talking about when they told about a mysterious people in the so-called Golden Age whose civilization disappeared overnight, called Atlantis. A volcano blew up on the island of Santorini (or Thera) about 1500 BC, causing a mive tidal wave that washed over nearly all of Crete except the mountains. It would have killed huge numbers of people. The ancient Egyptians recorded some disasters about that time. This may have been the event that is recorded in the Bible of the Plagues of Egypt and the Exodus, too -- you know, that pillar of flame at night and the flight of smoke by day that the fleeing Hebrews followed through the desert! Boy, would I love to talk to a Minoan! Wouldn't you?
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