Tartaria tablets

Prehistoric writing systems                                                                                                        From https://www.biblicaltraining.org/library/writing
“must be projected from the later known to the earlier unknown. The oldest known written documents were excavated at the site of ancient Uruk (Biblical Erech, Gen 10:10), and were inscribed about 3000 b.c. These are Sumer. tablets inscribed with economic texts in the non-Semitic, non-Indo-European Sumer. language. However recent investigation has demonstrated that the writing system of the Uruk and all later Sumer. texts was prob. not the invention of the Sumerians, although they undoubtedly modified and expanded it to fit their essentially monosyllabic language.
1. These unknown literary predecessors of the Sumerians have been called Proto-Euphrateans, from their apparent place of settlement (B. Landsberger, “Mezopotamya ’da Mendeniyetin Doğuṩu,” Ankara Universitesi Dil ve Tarih-Coğrafya Dergisi [1943-1945]). Some debate has ensued as to who these people were and from where they had come, but until an identifiable Proto-Euphratean settlement is excavated the problems will remain unsolved. However, the discovery in Rumanian Transylvania of an early neolithic village, Tartaria, with a cache of several tablets, all dated by stratigraphy to earlier than 3000 b.c., has enhanced the possibility that the elusive Proto-Euphrateans will be found. A comparison of Uruk and Tartaria signs is shown in figure 2. Perhaps the best solution is simply to denote the Tartaria texts as Proto-Balkan-Danubian. There is little question but that still older and more dispersed written materials will be discovered since the Proto-Balkan-Danubian signs appear to be at least logographic if not already syllabic.
3. Although the Uruk and Tartaria systems are the oldest now known, they were soon followed by a number of scripts of equally unknown origin and as yet quite resistant to decipherment. These all arose in Western Asia and are more hieroglyphic in the sense that the pictographic character of their execution is more obvious. Unlike either of the older systems they seem to be closer to simplified drawings of objects. Also the multiplicity of signs seems to indicate more than a syllabic system, although such a judgment is speculative. Sometime after 3000 b.c., the people of southwestern Iran known as Elamites produced an elaborate writing system called by scholars, Proto-Elamite. The Elamite language is non-Semitic and non-Indoeuropean. It is not related to any other known language, and so the texts as yet defy decipherment. From the placement of what appears to be numerical signs it is judged that they, like the Uruk texts, are economic in content. Dating from a slightly later time, there is a set of symbols on seals and inscribed pottery and metallic sheets. These were fabricated about 2300 b.c. at a group of towns on the Indus River, located at Harappa, Mohenjodaro and Chanhudaro. Specimens of the Proto-Elamite and Proto-Indic signs are seen in figure 3. Hieroglyphics are usually associated with Egypt about whose writing system the name was coined. In the oldest glyptic representations an early almost pictographic form of sign is found. These are on the slate plates, or palettes excavated at Hieraconpolis in Upper Egypt. These palettes yield scenes of the campaigns of ancient prehistoric Egypt. rulers. Although attempts have been made to associate them with known historical figures there is little to base final conclusions upon other than the obvious interpretation of the pictographs (fig. 3). Just what the stages in the later development of the elaborate hieroglyphic system were is now lost but some relationships can be deduced. Before the full blown Egyptian system was completed and, in fact, prior to its founding, the Proto-Euphratean, later Sumer. syllabary had been established and was to be the dominant writing of the Near East from 3000 to 500 b.c. In time the Uruk signs became stylized, and the streamlined and uniform strokes became known as “nail-shaped,” “wedgeshaped” writing in Eng., Keilschrift in Ger., but the French name has stuck as it was derived from the Lat. “cuneus”—“forma.”
The semasiographic
systems fall into three categories: a. Pictographs, simple cartoonlike illustrations of universal recognizance value, such as a picture of an animal or structure with its unique characteristics made obvious, e.g. figure 1: a. Phraseographs, usually several pictographs arranged to indicate an action but sufficiently interrelated that in time they become one effective unit, often the verbal or action indicator in pictographic scripts, e.g. figure 1: b. Logographs are word symbols where one word in 1:1 correspondence with one sign is understood although it is neither drawn visually nor indicated phonetically. Often like the other two types it is totally separate from the languages of the writer or reader. Livestock brands, ownership marks, certain ligatured abbreviations and even trade marks fall into this category. Modern examples abound in such logographs as, “&,” “7-UP,” or “$,” none of which have any relationship whatsoever to the words with which they are read, or the notions with which they are associated. Ancient writing systems often contain so many logograms that the meaning of a text is utterly unintelligible. Another disconcerting aspect of logographs is that they become so completely conventionalized and stylized that like some pictographs the original meaning is lost. In some ancient documents the actual word meant is never written out. It is systematically symbolized with a logogram. The result is that the actual word in the language is unknown, as if all “ands” in the Eng. language should be replaced by “&,” and in time the full spelling of “and” became lost. Some representative logographs are shown for comparison 1:c. Along with and slightly after the rise of the semasiographic systems, the language based phonographic systems appeared in the developing writing systems.Ultimately these tend to ward pure symbolic representation of speech but they fall short due to the necessity to economize the number of signs. This economy usually leads to “polyphony” where one sign has more than one phonetic sound attached to it. It is this difficulty which so aggravates Eng. spelling.
2.Again, as with the semasiographic systems three related phonographic systems arose. They are: a. Syllabic in which every sign represents not simply a unitary sound but also a combination of vowel or vowel plus consonant or consonant plus vowel or in the extreme consonant plus vowel plus consonant. Such a system works quite well with certain types of languages which have monosyllabic words; b. Phonemic systems have one sign for one sound, either a vowel or a consonant. Most syllabaries have dispersed within them perfectly sound phonetic alphabets; c. Subphonemic or, as they may be called, prosodic systems are made up of elaborate diacriticals which like musical notations indicate all nuances of the spoken word.”

My note.                                                                                                                                         Hmm….Proto-Euphratean later Sumer…why not? Read, think and say nothing:
Gr. πέλεκυς pelekus (double bited axe) compared with
Full text of “Bomhard – A Critical Review of Dolgopolsky’s Nostratic …
https://archive.org/…/BomhardACriticalReviewOfDolgopolskysNostraticDictionary/Bo…Nostratic macrofamily
Pal[y]:”to split,to divide” …… *palUKu ‘axe, hammer’: weak. 1717.

Pelekus,yes… but Mycenaean a-qi—ja—i ‘axe’;?

The Nostratic Macrofamily: A Study in Distant Linguistic Relationship
https://books.google.ro/books?isbn=3110875640
Allan R. Bomhard, ‎John C. Kerns

From A N I S T O R I T O N [http://www.anistor.gr/english/enback/2016_2e_Anistoriton.pdf                                          “15] Davis (2014) made the following statements about Linear-A (see also: [2]): “As for Linear A itself: the language behind the script appears to contain a fairly standard phonemic inventory, though there are hints of additional, more exotic phonemes. The morphology of the language appears to involve affixation, a typical mode of inflection in human languages. The presence of significant prefixing tends to rule out PIE as a parent language, while the word-internal vowel alternations typical of Afroasiatic verbal inflection are nowhere to be found in this script. In the end, Linear A appears most likely to represent a non-IE, nonAfroasiatic language, perhaps with agglutinative tendencies, and perhaps with VSO word order.” If not for the same reasons as explained in [2] above, this could well be supportive for our argument, since the only well-known and sufficiently documented and studied agglutinative language of Eastern Mediterranean and Near East area in the 3rd – 2nd millennia BC was none other but the Sumerian. The documents and studies about the other probably agglutinative language, the Hurrian (Diakonov & Starostin 1986), are much less numerous, while the phonetic values of the Aegean scripts clearly denote their Sumerian origin (Kenanidis 2013, 1992). However, Kenanidis & Papakitsos (2015, p. 339) are of the opinion that the largest part of the extant Linear-A corpus conveys a Semitic (probably Akkadian) language, with few inscriptions conveying Luwian, and hardly any extant inscriptions convey Sumerian which was the language of the inventors of the Cretan Protolinear script.
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSD5kOPzyRbCx16SOHNYI_JFdR5kACAdzi4Fc_rqu4_ayIAqf0u

1.EUROPE NEOLITHIC/BRONZE AGE WRITING LANDSCAPE

In neolithic, Vinca-Turdas culture developed toward writing slowly , step by step. On its own (independently) or influenced, by pressure of incoming migrating people waves. Pity, despite the fact that the social life was well, quite-high developed, the stage of organisation was not so high, at the level of those sumerian, egyptian or proto-elamite ones. Vinca culture become highly developed, but even in later Cucuteni-Tyripilia culture writing not reached the proto-writing stage. Not known or found exemples of writing from this later than Vinca cultures (my recollecction, not even of proto-writing) . Vincans missed another more 500-1000 years to reach proto writing and maybe later writing.The Vinca signs are pottery-mark signs, artistic and religious symbols, not much more.Tartaria tablets shows evidence of proto-writing, as using proto-cuneiform signs symilar or the same as proto-cuneiform sumerian. But out of Tartaria tablets (maybe + Gradeshnitza and +Dispilio tablet) we have no other examples.So they are isolates.(Not the same case with Cretan hieroglyphic and Linear A/B where we have hundreds of tablets).So the tablets are not pertaining to a high=organised society wich reached the stage to fix and transmit elements of economic and and social life by meaning of writing.In other words they are not Vincan’s.                                                   They are coming from somewhere outside area.                                                                There is a gap between Vinca-Turdas signs and organised Tartaria tablets signs.    So or they were made by “fallen from sky” sumerians, (from wich we have in the tablets all the signs  from sumerian proto-cuneiform sign library), or much realistic (much close?) anatolian metal prospectors. Or finaly none of above, coming by some kind of economic-cultural exchange from Aegean area. Bringed by a ?farmers/metal-workers?family coming from Aegean/Cyclades area. The round tablet shows evidence and signs of a syllabary, (even alphabetic writing in upper half.)                                               —————————- from papers related to suject —————————————————                           me:  …..Suspect connexion of Aegean writings to those of Near-East .Clues,hipothesys, arguments: 

The Tartaria Tablets M. S. F. Hood  https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003598X00033032

The inscribed clay tablets (PL. XVIa) found in a ‘Neolithic’ context at Tartaria (FIG. 1) in Romania in 1961 have already aroused a certain amount of interest here. The signs on the tablets are comparable with those of the script of the Late Predynastic (Uruk III Jemdet Nasr) period in Mesopotamia, as Dr Vlassa who excavated them has noted. It seems unlikely however that the tablets were drafted by a Sumerian hand or in the Sumerian language of early Mesopotamia. The shapes of the tablets and some of the signs are paralleled in the Minoan scripts of Crete, but the tablets do not seem to be Cretan. There are indications that a similar use of signs, if not actual writing, was practised in the rest of the Aegean and in Western Anatolia before the end of the 3rd millennium B.C. A knowledge of writing, or the use of signs derived from it, may have spread to these regions and to the Balkans from Mesopotamia through Syria. This was perhaps one aspect of a common inheritance of religious or magical beliefs and practices. ============================================================================

From http://www.anistor.gr/index.html Anistoriton Journal, vol. 15 (2016-2017) Essays 5 https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wIyjrlgkB-pTChOQSHfMneG9Q24e523fRqeFj46Wm4A/edit

   “[5] After an idea since 1978 and almost 10 years of research, Kenanidis (1992) published (in Modern Greek) a study connecting the phonetic values of the linear scripts’ syllabograms to common or culturally important words of the Archaic Sumerian language, through the rebus principle. This study extensively refers to the Cretan Protolinear script, considering as the only survived samples of it three inscriptions on: a clay seal (Karageorghis & Masson 1968); a fragment of vessel with three syllabograms (Kenanidis 1992, p. 3) that is officially regarded as a Linear-B inscription; and a part of an Eteocretan inscription (Duhoux 1982, pp. 95-111: Illustration 27) that, because of its late construction (300 BC), its authenticity had to be argued for (Kenanidis & Papakitsos 2015b).

[6] Weingarten (1994) argues for an administrative system in Crete (using seals and record keeping) that would have been directly imported from the Near East.

[7] Owens (1996) argues for the common origin of Cretan Hieroglyphs and Linear-A. Alternative approaches had been presented and commented in the recent past (Hooker 1992).

[8] Schoep (1999, p. 266) can not rule out the existence of a common ancestor for Cretan Hieroglyphics and Linear-A, based on the common signs. The two writing systems probably serve different needs (e.g. decorative and ritual vs. administrative).

[9] Glarner (2002) observes that many characters from Linear-A are identical to the archaic archetypes of the Mesopotamian Cuneiform. Yet, the relationship was rejected as impossible because of the large distance between the two areas (Mesopotamia and Crete). The rejection was very premature considering the next points:

▪ All that we know about the Sumerians is from what was written on the existing cuneiform tablets. There are hundreds of thousands of such tablets but only about 10% have been read so far (BAS-Library 2005; Watkins & Snyder 2003). There are still many thousands of tablets in the store rooms of museums but there are not enough experts to read them.

▪ Historical evidence written on the deciphered part of the existing cuneiform tablets was ignored: The tablets of Mari (18th century BC), stating that “the hand of Sargon” had reached places beyond the “upper sea” (Mediterranean) as far as the island of copper (Cyprus) and “Kaptara”, the most ancient reference to Crete (Strange 1982; Drandakis 1956); Before the era of Sargon the Great (24th-23rd centuries BC), the earliest reports extend the rule of the Sumerian kingdoms to the Mediterranean coast since the 28th century BC, during the reign of Meskiaggasher, king of Uruk (Jacobsen 1939). The same wide regional coverage appears during the reign of Lugalanemundu (2525-2500 BC), king of Adab (Guisepi and Willis 2003).

▪ The period of the Uruk expansion was not known (Sundsdal 2011; Algaze 2005a,b), while Kramer (1963) was also ignored: “...by the third millennium BC, there is good reason to believe that Sumerian culture and civilization had penetrated, at least to some extent, as far East as India and as far West as the Mediterranean, as far South as Ancient Ethiopia and as far North as the Caspian”.

▪ Migration, a phenomenon as ancient, wide and intense as the human kind, is not adequately studied (for a discussion see: van Dommelen 2014).

[10] Castleden (2002, p. 100) observed that some signs of Cretan Hieroglyphics resemble symbols from a Mesopotamian script pre-dating cuneiform, suggesting that this writing system was imported from East.

[11] According to Fischer (2004, p.34), the rebus principle (see [5]) had been originally invented by the Sumerians. Their influence expanded to Indus Valley, Iran, Nile and probably Balkans (as he suspects and we argue for as well).

[12] Woudhuizen (2005) interpreted Linear-A as a linearization of the Akkadian cuneiform signs. This is supportive for the herein argument, since every sign in written Akkadian has a Sumerian origin. However, the natural process for a script is to evolve from pictorial signs (like the Sumerian pre-cuneiform) into non-recognizable forms (like the late cuneiform) and not the reverse (e.g. see: Karnava 2015). So, we make the reverse proposal herein: both the early Aegean scripts and Cuneiform were two evolutionary branches of the same trunk (Sumerian pre-cuneiform signs). The former branch followed an “analogic” path via drawn lines, while the latter a “digitalized” one (impressed strokes), thus starting to depict the icons in a more abstract and quick manner.-European, running the gamut from Uralic (proto-Finnish), proto-Niger Congo to proto-Semitic and Sumerian all the way through to proto-Altaic and proto-Japanese. While it is patently impossible that all of these proto-languages could be at the base of the Minoan language, it is nevertheless remotely conceivable that one of them just might be. But which one? Given the tangled mass of contradictions these so-called decipherments land us in, I am left with no alternative but to pronounce that none of these so-called proto-languages is liable to stand the test of linguistic verisimilitude. All of this leaves me with an uneasy feeling of déjà vu.

                                   2.SUPPOSED, EXPECTED LANGUAGE OF THE PEOPLE WICH SCRAPED THE TABLETS

“If” the tablets would have been old as expected (5.500B.C.) the language could be proto-Euphratean.If age is around 3.000 B.C. the language could be euphratean=sumerian. Not realistic to think that an sumerian speditioners group overun thousends of km/miles and reached Transylvania. But I looked close to those signs, and the tablets are not so old.The entire scientific comunity was fooled by supposed C14 age determination (5.500 B.C.!!) wich was not and cannot be done enymore.

An Introduction to the Study of the Danube Script Harald Haarmann and Joan Marler https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WHPWd9hJnGyi91BDQ6MA_wZ1KAuoaa60bt97VvwEoW8/edit

“As long as the absolute age of the tablets was undetermined and archaeologists dated the artifacts to the third millennium BCE, most of those scholars who engaged in the discussion were convinced that the signs inscribed on the Tărtăria tablets reflected a far-distant cultural influence from Sumerian civilization.”

Especially the round tablet shows evidence and signs of a syllabary, even alphabetic writing in upper half. But i am exposing you the folowing:

Oldest writing in Europe are Cretan hieroglyphic and Linear A. (2.200-1500 B.C.) Back to 1800 B.C. we could expect an Indo-European language as Mycenaean/Linearb=proto-greek language.

Olders ones than Linear B, wich are Cretan hieroglyphic and Linea A are UNKNOWN.There are many papers wich got partial simylarities with semitic family and Luwian, but not found an definite language.Now I am asking you:

IF CRETAN HIEROGLYPHIC AND LINEAR A ARE USING  UNKNOWN LANGUAGES ( SOME-HOW WICH SHOWS TO BE RELATED TO SEMITIC, LUWIAN AND GOD KNOWS WHAT OTHER LANGUAGE ), OLDER THAN THIS FORM OF PROTO-GREEK=LINEAR B, THEN                                                    WHAT LANGUAGE COULD SOMEBODY EXPECT FROM TARTARIA TABLETS (?3200-1800B.C.?)  ? 

 —————————- from papers related to the suject —————————————————   

From Anistoriton Journal, vol. 15 (2016-2017) Essays 1  Cretan Hieroglyphics The Ornamental and Ritual Version of the Cretan Protolinear Script   https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?tab=wm#inbox/164454be0ed39a2d?projector=1&messagePartId=0.1

“There are many proposals about the underlying language or languages of Linear-A, because of the difficulty to recognize the conveyed languages, since they are very poorly known and neither the script is known, although reasonable speculations are possible from the comparison to Linear-B and the Cypriot Syllabary (Kenanidis & Papakitsos 2015a). These proposed languages are:

▪ the Semitic/Akkadian (Woudhuizen 2005; Gordon 1981),

▪ the Proto-Aeolic (Tsikritsis 2006; Anistoriton 2001),

▪ the Pelasgian/Proto-Ionic (as an Indo-European one closely related but not identical to Proto-Greek, see: Owens 2007, 2000; Faucounau 2001),

▪ a Proto-Indo-European (Hicks 2005),

▪ the Luwian (Woudhuizen 2005, 2002; Brown 1992-1993),

▪ a non-Greek language closely related to Hittite (Davis 1964, p. 106),

▪ the Lycian (Kazansky 2012) and

▪ several different languages, making use of an originally Sumerian script (Papakitsos & Kenanidis 2015; Kenanidis & Papakitsos 2015a; Kenanidis 2013, 1992). Some more proposals can be also found, concerning other languages like the Etruscan (Perono Cacciafoco 2014).”

From http://people.ku.edu/~jyounger/LinearA/#3                                                                   John Younger (jyounger@ku.edu)                                                                                           Linear A Texts & Inscriptions
in phonetic transcription & Commentary

<< Linear A has not yet been demonstrably linked to any known language family.

“The languages which have been used for comparison are of two families: Indo-European, especially an Anatolian language such as Luwian (Palmer, Meriggi [and Ed Brown of UNC-CH]); Semitic (Gordon, Best, and others)… First no inflexional forms such as characterize Indo-European or Semitic languages can be clearly demonstrated, hence the identifications depend largely on vocabulary, which is notoriously easily borrowed. Secondly, the Semitic comparisons are mainly with triconsonantal roots — yet if the vowels are ignored we are leaving out half the information presented by the script, and thus much decreasing the chances of success. Thirdly, if the languge of Linear A does not belong to a well-known family, then the chances of identifiying it are virtually nil. This is not to say that Linear A remains undecipherable; as more documents are found and published, we shall understand more of it. But I doubt very much if speculation at this stage can help; I feel strongly that is likely to belong to an unfamiliar type.” (Chadwick 1975: 147)

If Crete was deliberately colonized in developed Neolithic, probably from SW Anatolia (Broodbank & Strasser 1991), it would seem logical to surmise that the Minoan language could be related to one of the Indo-Hittite dialects, most probably Luvian. >>   

Another opinion of Andras Zeke/Hungary: https://linearbknossosmycenae.com/tag/liquid-measurement/page/2/

Conclusions concerning the many failed attempts at deciphering Minoan Linear A:

The worst of all the pretensions of the authors of the aforementioned monographs and tractata are their untenable claims that they have in fact deciphered Minoan Linear A. How is it even remotely possible that these soi- disant decipherers of Minoan Linear A can claim to have discovered the so-called magic bullet in the guise of the proto-language upon which their decipherment has been based, when the proto-languages they invoke are soà wildly disparate? These decipherers have turned to a number of proto-languages, some of them Indo-European (such as proto-Greek and Proto-Slavic), others non proto-Indo-European, running the gamut from Uralic (proto-Finnish), proto-Niger Congo to proto-Semitic and Sumerian all the way through to proto-Altaic and proto-Japanese. While it is patently impossible that all of these proto-languages could be at the base of the Minoan language, it is nevertheless remotely conceivable that one of them just might be. But which one? Given the tangled  mass of contradictions these so-called decipherments land us in, I am left with no alternative but to pronounce that none of these so-called proto-languages is liable to stand the test of linguistic verisimilitude. All of this leaves me with an uneasy feeling of déjà vu.

Instead, I have adopted the unique approach of declaring that it does not matter what proto- language Minoan derives from, or for that matter, whether or not it, like modern Basque, is a language isolate, meaning a natural (spoken) language, ancient (dead) or modern (alive) with no demonstrable genealogical or genetic relationship with any other language whatsoever or alternatively, a language that has not been demonstrated to descend from an ancestor common with any other language in the world. (italics mine).

and again:

In an article of this nature, which is the first of its kind in the world ever to deal with the partial, but by no means definitive, decipherment of Minoan Linear A, I must of necessity focus on those Minoan Linear A terms which offer the greatest insight into the vocabulary of the language, but not the language itself. Anyone who dares claim he or she has “deciphered” the Minoan language is skating on very thin ice. Any attempt to decipher the Minoan language is severely trammelled by the incontestable fact that no one knows what the language is or even what language class it belongs to, if any.

    From https://linearbknossosmycenae.wordpress.com/tag/linguistics/page/10/?iframe=true&preview=true%2Ffeed%2F Andras Zeke /Hungary

How did I manage to decipher 17 Minoan Linear A words in 1 month? The 4 principles

That is the burning question. And here are the reasons why. To begin with, it is impossible to decipher any unknown ancient language by relying on its internal structure alone. It simply cannot be done. We must have recourse to certain fundamental principles before we even being to attempt any decipherment. So far, I have been able to isolate four of them. These are:

1. The attempt to correlate Minoan with known ancient language (negative principle or factor):

All too many past researchers and philologists attempting to decipher Minoan Linear A have made the assumption that they had first to determine what class of language it must or may have belonged to before they even began to attempt decipherment. This is, as we shall see, a false premise, a non starter, a dead end.

The very first of these researchers to make such an assumption was none other than Sir Arthur Evans himself, though he could hardly be blamed for doing so, being as he was at the very frontier of the science of archaeology at the outset of the twentieth century, up until the First World War when he had to suspend archaeological work at Knossos (1900-1914). I made this clear in my article, “An Archaeologist’ s Translation of Pylos tablet Py TA 641-1952 (Ventris)”, in Vol. 10 (2014) in the prestigious international journal, Archaeology and Science (Belgrade) ISSN 1452-7448, in which I emphasized and I quote from Evans:

It would seem, therefore, unlikely that the language of the Cretan scripts was any kind of Greek, and probable that it was related to the early language or languages of Western Anatolia – associated, that is, with the archaeological 'cultures’ of Alaja Hüyük I ('proto-hattic’) and of Hissarlik II and Yortan ('Luvian’)...”, and a little further, “Though many of the sign-groups are compounded from distinct elements, usually of two syllables each, there is little trace of an organized system of grammatical suffixes, as in Greek. At most, a few signs are notably frequent as terminals... (italics mine) and this in spite of its great antiquity, given that it preceded the earliest known written Greek, The Iliad and The Odyssey of Homer by at least 600 years! It was a perfectly reasonable and plausible assumption, in view of the then understandable utter lack of evidence to the contrary.

Returning to my own analysis:

Besides, there were no extant tablets in either Minoan Linear A or Linear B with parallel text in another known ancient language, as had conveniently been the case with the Rosetta Stone, which would have gone a long way to aiming for a convincing decipherment of at least the latter script.  Yet Evans was nagged by doubts lurking just
below the surface of his propositions. (pp. 137-138)

So Evans was vacillating between the assumption that the Minoan language may have been related either to Luvian or Hittite (a brilliant assumption for his day and age) and that it was an ancestral form of proto-Greek. Both assumptions were wrong, but if only he had known that Linear B was alternatively the actual version of a very ancient East Greek dialect, namely, Mycenaean Greek, how different would the history of the decipherment of Linear B at least have been. 

To complicate matters, Michael Ventris himself, following in the footsteps of Evans, began by making the same assumption, only this time correlating (italics mine) Linear B with Etruscan, stubbornly sticking with this assumption for almost 2 years before Linear B literally threw in his face the ineluctable conclusion that the script was indicative of Mycenaean Greek (June 1952).

My point is and here I must be emphatic. It is a total waste of time trying to pigeon-hole the lost Minoan language in any class of language, whether Indo-European or not. It will get us absolutely nowhere. So I have concluded (much to my own relief and with positive practical consequences) that it does not matter one jot what class of language Minoan belongs to, and that it serves us best simply to jump into the deep waters without further ado, and to attempt to decipher it on its own terms, i.e. internally.

2. Cross-correlation between Minoan and a known ancient language: 

Notice that in 1. above I italicized the word correlating. This is no accident at all. It is only by the process of cross-correlation with a known language that we can even begin to decipher an unknown one. And of course, the known language with which the Minoan language must be cross-correlated is none other than Mycenaean in Linear B, if not for any reason other than that Linear B uses basically the same syllabary as its predecessor, with only a modicum of changes required by the latter to represent Mycenaean Greek, more or less accurately. This assumption or principle, if you like, is squarely based on the approach used by the renowned French philologist, Jean-François Champollion, who finally deciphered in 1822, 23 years after it was discovered in Egypt in 1799.

             —————————————————————————————————————————-

eugenrau: THE SAME WAS THE CASE AS VINCA PEOPLE WERE SUPPOSED COMING FROM (?SW?) ANATOLIA !                                                                                                                                 ……………………or even from far  Cilicia-Levant(Syria) I would say (A priori, no language attested in the third or second millennium from the eastern Mediterranean or its surrounding areas can be excluded […] the languages spoken by people from the coasts of Asia Minor or Syro- Palestine must be favoured.

See:

Cretan Hieroglyphs http://www.ancientscripts.com/cretan_hieroglyphs.html&nbsp;            Bronze Age Crete was home to the powerful seafaring civilization known to the modern world as the Minoans. As the first literate culture of Europe, the Minoans employed not one but two related writing systems. The more commonly known system is Linear A due to the rectilinear shape of its symbols. The second system, more ancient but less well-known and even less understood, is called Cretan Hieroglyphs.Most early writing systems have their origins in iconographic systems and likewise.                                   Cretan Hieroglyphs most likely evolved out of non-linguistic symbols on sealstones from the late 3rd and early 2nd millenium BCE. Cretan Hieroglyphs was the first writing of the Minoans and predecessor to Linear A, which in turn gave rise to Linear B and Cypriot. Cretan Hieroglyphs remains undeciphered as no interpretation is widely accepted. One impediment to decipherment is that the seal texts are short and the sign sequences relatively formulaic, which means little the same problem preventing the decipherment of Indus Script. It is possible to compare its signs to Linear A and Linear B signs and produce a syllabic grid, but since the underlying language is unknown, few words aside from accounting terms and place names can be distinguished. Cretan Hieroglyphs’ language was certainly not Greek, the language of Linear B.

SEMITIC LINEAR A INSCRIPTIONS https://cryptcracker.blogspot.com/2016/09/semitic-crete.html

This is a supplement to CRETO-SEMITICA

The Kaptarian logo-syllabary of Crete (Linear A)

Kaptar was a name applied to Crete in the Bronze Age; it was Kaphtor in the Bible (Caphtorim were from Caphtor, Deuteronomy 2:23; Philistines came from Caphtor, Amos 9:7; ditto, Jeremiah 47:4), Kptr in Ugaritic texts, and Keftiu in Egypt.[1]

SEMITIC INSCRIPTIONS FROM CRETE

Eteocretan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eteocretan_language

(/ˌiːtioʊˈkriːtən, ˌɛt-/ from Greek: Ἐτεόκρητες Eteókrētes, lit. “true Cretans”, itself composed from ἐτεός eteós “true” and Κρής Krḗs “Cretan”)^[2] is the non-Greek language of 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 is not understood, is probably a survival of a language spoken on Crete before the arrival of Greeks and is probably derived from the Minoan languagepreserved in the Linear A inscriptions of a millennium earlier.

Were the ancient Minoans of Crete Semitic? Did they speak a Semitic language?  https://www.quora.com/Were-the-ancient-Minoans-of-Crete-Semitic-Did-they-speak-a-Semitic-language

There is one more approach to the Minoan language. Several classical texts refer to a non-Greek people living in Crete in classical times: the so-called Eteocretans (i.e. “True Cretans”) who might be identified with the pre-Greek Minoans. These Eteocretans allegedly dwelt in Praisos on Crete, and from this town come a handful of inscriptions (from memory from the 4th century B.C. — I have not checked this!) written with Greek letters, but self-evidently not in the Greek language. The inscriptions are utterly unintelligible. They could conceivably be written in a language descended from the Minoan language, but this is only a guess. Nothing in these inscriptions can be linked up with something in the Linear A documents, so, for now, this too appears to be a scholarly dead end.

Ultimately the Minoans remain an enigma. If we could ever read the Linear A documents, we would know a lot more about them, including obviously what language they spoke. For the foreseeable future, however, the Linear A texts, along with the Eteocretan ones, are unintelligible with the exception of the group of two signs to indicate “total”.

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