[Note: All Basque words are in Italics and Bold-faced Green]
LINEAR-B
/ BASQUE ASSOCIATION *
A review derived from the following: Nyland, Edo. 2001. Linguistic Archaeology: AnIntroduction. Trafford Publ., Victoria, B.C., Canada. ISBN 1-55212-668-4. 541 p.
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Introduction
While digging in
Knossos on the isle of Crete, the archaeologist
Arthur Evans found a number of tablets and seal stones that were inscribed
with writing. He identified three different types of script, which he called
hieroglyphic, Linear-A and Linear-B. At the time, no attempt at decipherment
could be made because there was too little material to work with. Not until
many more clay tablets with Linear-B writing had been found in subsequent
digs on Crete and on the Greek mainland, had it become possible to make an
attempt at deciphering. Michael Ventris, a young English architect announced
in 1952 that he had succeeded in deciphering Linear-B and had proven that
this old writing was archaic Greek. He identified 89 Linear-B characters and
established phonetic values for most of them, which was adequate to translate
many of the tablets (see Nyland 2001 for
details). The majority of
the tablets he worked with had come from the once beautiful Pylos palace of King Nestor, located on the west coast
of the Peloponnisos in south Greece.
This site had been destroyed through violent human activity and a very
hot fire. The heat of the fire had baked the soft clay tablets into
indestructible pottery tablets. The deciphering of the writing gave Ventris
no idea about the circumstances of the attack, and the fate of the
inhabitants remained unknown to him. Almost all of
the Pylos tablets appeared to relate to one village, in which the majority of
the landholders had religious titles. This indicated that Ventris was dealing
with a very unusual settlement, similar to later religious centers in
Europe. They were established to
introduce a new religion and social order in areas where an older religion
had been practiced before. The 89
characters used in the writing revealed that Ventris was dealing with a
syllabic script. Most of the phonetic
values were represented by one consonant and one vowel, e.g., in-di-vi-du-al
or Ca-na-da. This contrasts to pictographic, or ideographic, scripts where
one symbol represents one word.
Examples are Chinese with thousands of characters, or an alphabetic
script like English in which a small number of characters represents the
sounds which make up the words. To find out how Ventris deciphered the
script, please refer to John Chadwick's
"The Decipherment of Linear B" (Penguin Books). By
agglutinating the phonetic values he had obtained, Ventris was able to show
that the language used was an early form of Greek. The job of deciphering was
still not completely finished when Ventris was tragically killed in a car
accident and his work was written up for popular consumption by his co-worker
Chadwick. The syllabic system
of writing is reminiscent of the ancient Ogam inscriptions of Ireland written
on stone and the Benedictines' manual the "Auraicept na n'Eces", in which most syllables had been made up of vowel-consonant-vowel,
the first three letters of Basque words, using the acrophonic principle. This
possible similarity prompted Edo Nyland to apply the Basque language to the
sentences that Ventris had worked out. In the back of his book, Chadwick included
some tablets in transcription and of these, a few are selected. The following
results are fascinating. Each example
shows two possible translations of the text.
The first done by Michael Ventris is from ancient Greek. The second is from Basque, using Nyland’s (2001) technique: THE PYLOS TABLETS PYLOS TABLET PY Fr 1184
Transcribed text: ko-ra-ro a-pe-do-ke e-ra-wo to-so e-u-me-de-i pa-ro
i-pe-se-wa ka-ra-re-we.
Ventris' translation: Kokalos repaid the following quantity of olive
oil to Eumedes: 648 liters of oil. From Ipsewas, thirty-eight stirrup jars (?). Translation from
Basque:
Within each word
made up with the symbols, the vowel of the preceding morpheme is the same as
the first vowel of the following morpheme; which is called vowel interlocking. When the archaic
Greek word starts with a consonant, the first vowel is often missing and must
be recovered by testing all five vowels, in which case a dot has temporarily
been placed in the spot of the missing letter. A slash indicates where the
vowel interlocking is broken. PYLOS TABLET PY Ta722
Transcribed text: ta-ra-nu a-ja-me-no e-re-pa-te-jo a-to-ro-qo i-qo-qe
po-ru-po-de-qe...
Ventris' translation: One footstool inlaid with a man
and a horse and an octopus and a griffin in ivory. Translation from Basque:
PYLOS TABLET PY Sa 794
Transcribed text: ka-ko de-de-me-no no-pe-re-e.
Translation from Basque:
"While remembering the terror, we had to recover from the
defeat by gently giving very good care to the
afflicted and performing surgery." KNOSSOS TABLET KN Gg 702
Transcribed text: pa-si-te-o-i me-ri da-pu-ri-to-jo po-ti-ni-ja-me-ri.
one amphora of honey. Translation from Basque: .pa ipa ipartar
northerner Translation = The northerners have started the work of burying in the forest
after a nightmare of agony during which they gored, destroyed, and drowned
mercilessly while robbing. When we were left alone many were still shivering
and frightened after this nightmare of agony. This last tablet
came from Knossos. It was probably
written 200 years before the other three from Pylos. It is included here to
show that double-speak was not only practiced in Pylos, but may have been a
regular feature of their writing. In this case, the northerners may well be
the Achaeans themselves who are thought to have conquered Crete at that time.
It looks like the Achaeans received in Pylos the same treatment they had
meted out in Knossos, only at the hands of very different people.
.mu - uka - ena - ahi
PYLOS WAS PREPARING FOR THE
ATTACK
Many of the
tablets found at Pylos described preparations for an attack that had obviously
been expected from the direction of the sea. Michael
Wood in his book "In Search of the Trojan War" wrote the
following: "One of the
most important tablets is entitled: 'Thus the watchers are guarding the
coasts : command of Maleus at Owitono... 50 men of Owitono to go to Oikhalia,
command of Nedwatas.... 20 men of Kyparssia at Aruwote, 10 Kyparissia men at
Aithalewes.... command of Tros at Ro'owa: Kadasijo a shareholder, performing
feudal service.... 110 men from Oikhalia to Aratuwa. Some of the last tablets
written at Pylos speak of rowers being drawn from five places to go to
Pleuron on the coast. A second list, incomplete, numbers 443 rowers, crews
for at least fifteen ships. A much larger list speaks of 700 men as defensive
troops; gaps on the tablet suggest that when complete, around 1000 men were
marked down, the equivalent of a force of 30 ships". It was all to no
avail. The first attackers appear to have targeted the priests but did no
burning. This allowed the scribes enough time to describe the attack on their
tablets when the second wave of attackers arrived who devastated the palace
with fire and beat anyone they could find. The old story that the Dorians came over land from
the north and devastated the palaces may well be true, but they may have done
it in cooperation with the Sea Peoples' attacks in boats. The only strangers
for whom we have good evidence are the Sea Peoples and their main goal was to
stop the advance of the new philosophy of the jealous male gods, and not to
take slaves or even to plunder, which was incidental. The attacks were
successful because, like the Hittite empire, we know that the Achaean
civilization came to an abrupt end. Only Athens was apparently able to ward
off the attacks. Edo Nyland has
explained how the Saharan language was spoken in
all of Europe as a common language, because almost the entire population of
Europe had migrated from the Sahara when the formerly productive land became
a desert (see Climate). With the coming of the new
cults of the sky gods from Anatolia, all of them promoted male
domination. Priests had been sent to
many parts of Europe with orders to destroy the ancient religion of the
Goddess, wipe out the tribal system, create nations, introduce private
landownership and invent new languages with different scripts for each new
nation. This meant that every new language had to be based on the old Saharan language because there was no other from which
to work. The newly created languages are known today as the Indo-European
"family" of languages. The old Saharan language survives as Basque in Europe and in a more
compromised form as Dravidian in India and Ainu in Japan. With this background,
it is not difficult to suggest that the tragic turmoil in the eastern
Mediterranean was the result of a religious war. The aggressively expanding
new religion had to be stopped and the people of the Goddess united in one
massive effort to eliminate the culprits, an effort which involved more than
1,000 ships. The Hittite empire was destroyed by the Kirrukaska (called Kaska in the clay tablets) from the Black Sea
coast and the Sea Peoples from the south. The
Egyptians documented a great deal of this war on the walls of Ramses III's
temple at Medinet Habu and
other places. According to these descriptions, the Sea Peoples had come from
their islands in the midst of the Great Green Sea, now known as the
Atlantic Ocean. The travels of Odysseus describes the homecoming of one or
more of these groups, which must have been composed of Irish, Scots, Phaikians (Vikings),
Berbers and Canary Islanders, possibly in concert with the Sardinians and the
Corsicans. The much later crusades to the Holy Land must have looked like a
replay in miniature. DOUBLE-SPEAK
IN BASQUE AND GREEK
The amazing
characteristic of the syllabic system is that it allows the linguist to apply
one language, Basque, to the script and come up with one translation, while
another language, Greek, may produce a very different story from the same
characters, as the examples above show. Nyland
(2001) found the same in "Olla Vogala" in which two lines of the writing are in Latin, which
were then translated into two lines of archaic Dutch, both telling the same
story about birds. Applying Basque to all four lines produced a quite
different and coherent bird story. That Basque was involved in Linear-A and
-B has been proposed long ago. In 1931 a booklet was published by the Oxford
University Press entitled "Through Basque to Minoan" in
which the author, F.G. Gordon, tried to
interpret the script with the use of Basque. He identified each sign as an
object and then gave its name in the language assumed. His incomplete and
pre-maturely published efforts had such a negative influence upon future
linguists that the use of Basque for any early language has been ridiculed
until now. Yet Gordon had taken the first steps on the right track. All Indo-European and Semitic languages
and Sumerian and Akadian, are based on the old Saharan
language, which survives today in mostly unaltered form as Basque. |