[Note: All Basque words are in Italics and Bold-faced Green]
BASQUE AND
LINEAR-B *
(Contact)
INTRODUCTION
While digging in Knossos on
the isle of Crete, the great 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. 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 wer established to introduce a new religion and social
order in areas where an older religion had been practiced before. SOLVING THE LINEAR-B PUZZLE 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, I selected a few. 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 Edo
Nyland’s 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.
Translation from Basque: .pa ipa
ipartar
northerner 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. THE BASQUE CONNECTION 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 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 also Sumerian and Akadian, are based on
the old Saharan language, which survives today in
mostly unaltered form as Basque. |
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For further detail, please
refer to:
Nyland, Edo. 2001. Linguistic Archaeology: AnIntroduction. Trafford Publ., Victoria, B.C., Canada.
ISBN 1-55212-668-4. 541 p. [ see
abstract & summary]
Nyland, Edo. 2002.
Odysseus and the Sea Peoples: A
Bronze Age History of Scotland Trafford Publ., Victoria,
B.C., Canada. 307
p. [see
abstract & summary].
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