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On this page:
The Greeks and their Alphabet
The Minoan Culture and Scripts
The Semitic Alphabet
Conclusions
 More on language origins.

Hebrew and Greek
What is known about the myths of the pre-literate peoples who were the foundation of Western Culture? Most of what we know comes to us by way of language and a few precious physical artifacts. We try to reconstruct the past from the clues we have, but does anyone really understand the ancient past? Many of us would like to be able to get in a time machine and go back to experience what the world was really like. But for the most part we are stuck having to reconstruct the past from written accounts of ancient myths; writings that were usually produced by  people living long after the myths were born in pre-literate cultures.

Western Culture is fundamentally rooted in the Judeo-Christian and Greek cultures. We have to understand the origins of languages like Hebrew and Greek if we are to understand these ancient people and the formation of Western Culture. As we explore the past, we can keep this question in mind: Why did Modern Science arise out of the cultural heritage of the Hebrews and the Greeks?

The Written Word
The change from language that was only spoken and heard to language that was also written and read has been proposed to  have had important effects not only on human culture but also on the functioning of the human mind. We might speculate that some early human brains were better suited for dealing with written language than others. Did some peoples thrive on the written word while others simply could not make good use of this amazing new tool? Did some elements of the modern alphabet suit the minds of people who spoke one type of language while different elements matched the ways of other groups of people who spoke different languages? Investigation of the impact of this mind amplifying tool, writing, on the human mind is a large field of study that is just starting to be explored in an organized way. In ancient Akkadia (a site of use of one of the first syllabic scripts) a popular metaphor for getting someone's attention was "to turn their ear". This reminds us of our primate origins and alarm calls used to attract the attention and cooperation of the troop. What happened to the mental habits of people who began to learn a written script at an early age? How does writing alter the human mind?  (source)

The Origins of Written Language in the Modern Form.
One example of the importance of consilience within cultural anthropology between physical and linguistic evidence is the search for the origins of the alphabetic mode of writing. We need to explore the origin of the modern alphabet because the great flowering of Greek thought was made possible by the complete alphabet that was invented by Greek speaking people. How did this important inovation come about where and when it did?

Another example of the search for consilience is the quest for physical evidence of mythical objects such as Noah's Ark. Knowing how to decide which myths are worthy of archeological invenstigation is a subtle art that eludes many enthusiasts of the stdy of the past. There is no discussion of the search for Noah's arc at this web site, but I do take seriously the Atlantis myth. The discovery of an archeological site in Asia minor that may be Homer's Troy was a stimulous to other investigations that resulted in discovery of the important scripts of Crete. How were the Minoan scripts related to the cultural development of Greece?

A good example of consilience between myth and archeology relates to legends about an advanced culture of sea-faring people, often labeled by our modern culture as the Atlantians. What is the cultural relevance of the Atlantian myth?

I am going to explore the Atlantis myth as an example of a cultural memory that spans the gap between the ancient world of humanity before the development of a complete alphabetic script and the origins of our modern Western Culture in Ionian Greece. Although I will mention other examples of such bridges to the past (such as Homer's Trojan War, The Gilgamesh Legends, and the Biblical stories), I want to emphasize Atlantis because of the central role of Plato in bringing us the Atlantis legend, and the possibility that the Atlantians provided Western Culture with half of the solution to the problem of how to construct the modern alphabet. If we follow the Atlantis myth to its likely source, we will be will be led to explore how Plato and other Classical Greek philosophers came to be culturally linked to the other main root of Western Civilization, the Judeo-Christian root.

Western Culture is largely, although not exclusively, built on Greek and Hebrew origins. The Greek and Hebrew cultures both developed at the great cultural nexus between Europe, Africa, and Asia. This historical example illustrates the importance of bringing together ideas from isolated sources, and so provides us with motivation towards other acts of synthesis within the Science of Mind. The development of the modern alphabet was made possible by a kind of slow and unconscious conglomeration of ideas from different cultures. If we learn such lessons, then we can consciously work to bring together isolated ideas and in so doing speed progress along faster than would be possible by unconscious bumbling.

The Hebrew culture grew out of ancient Semitic culture, which has closer ties to Africa while Greek culture is thought to have Asian origins. There are many languages related to Hebrew, allowing us to fit Hebrew into a broad cultural context. Ancient Greek is generally taken to be the only representative (though there are different dialects) of the Greek or Hellenic branch of Indo-European (source). We are mainly restricted to examination of the development of Greek and its modifications through interactions with other languages. My exploration of the origins of the Greek alphabet will show that while the Indo-European Greeks and the Semitic peoples are usually credited as the great inovators in the development of written language, another less appreciated culture of the ancient world probably also contributed to the pillar of the foundation of Western Culture that is our heritage of written language. We are led to this interesting possibility by way of exploration of myths and legend such as Homer's Troy and Plato's Atlantis.

Origins of The Greeks and their Alphabet.
We can explore the development of the Greek Culture in terms of interactions of Greek speaking peoples with three other groups of ancient humans who inhabited the Eastern Mediterranean region:

1) First, the Greek tribes interacted with other members of the Indo-European super-family of tribes. Homer's Troy was probably controlled for much of its history by other tribes of Indo-Europeans that had at least some their gods and the language form in common with the Greek tribes. The city of Troy may have been mostly assimilated into early Greek culture at the time of the Homeric Trojan war.

2) Second, the Greeks interacted with a group of indiginous Mediterranean people. We know very little about these native Mediterraneans because they were essentially removed from existence by other people like the Indo-Europeans; their culture was absorbed and obliterated. These "lost" people have no surviving descendants who retain the original language of the East Mediterranian, so we do not have a good name for them. I am going to invent a name for these people and call them the Sea People. The only other romantic alternative is to simply call them the Atlantians, but  "Sea People" has the advantage of being a term that has previosly been linked to the Hebrew side of our cultural heritage, and I want to emphasize links between the Greeks and the Hebrews who provided the two major cultural currents that formed Western Civilization. I will explore the idea that the inclusion of a full set of vowel characters in the Greek alphabet was an important inovation provided by the Sea People.

3) Third, the Greeks had an important interaction with Semitic people. In particular, the Greeks got the characters of their alphabet from the Semitic Phoenicians who were closely related to the Hebrews. When Alexander the Great later swept through the Mideast, Classical Greek returned to the Hebrews in a dramatic way and greatly impacted on the formation of Christianity. If Hebrew literacy can be said to have saved our Western cultural memory of Moses, it can also be argued that Greek Literacy brought to Western Civilization a cultural memory of Jesus. Our probes into the origins of Greek and Hebrew will get us started on the road to understanding how our Greek and Hebrew herritage led to Modern Science.

The study of languages.
There are thousands of human languages that have their roots in the early human past. Chimps are able to make excellent vowel sounds. We might call these sounds "hoots" in the same sense that humans still hoot in order to attract attention or participate in a group noise making event (Hey! Ha! Yeah!). Humans evolved the delicate motor control that allows us to consciously make fine tools by hand and produce tricky consonant sounds with our lips and and other mouth parts. If you look inside the human brain you find commitment of large regions of the brain to the fine control of the muscles of the hands and in the mouth region. These changes in brain structure related to fine motor control are part of the major biological difference between humans and chimps that makes it possible for humans to have language while chimps cannot. Our ability to control our breathing and our mouth muscles allowed us to evolve human language.

A key question is: how old is human language? I suspect that human language, as a form of communication distinct from chimp calls, started developing about 5 million years ago. Human language probably reached the form in which we know it about 100,000 years ago. My guess is that human language evolved along with the human brain. There has been pleanty of time for humans to migrate around the world and produce the great diversity in human languages that now exists. The study of linguistic diversity in human cultures goes hand-in-hand with the study of our purely biological diversity, our genetic endowment. Much work remains to be done in reconstructing the relations between our genes and the geographical origins of the various peoples of the world such as the Greeks and the Hebrews. In the future,  new tools of genetics and new archeological finds will greatly clarify our understanding of the past. For now, we must make do with what we have.

Starting about 5,000 years ago, a few human civilizations obtained enough stability and wealth to start exploring writing in a systematic way. It was natural for people to use little pictures to represent spoke words, but what is the fundamental unit of language? An idea, a word, a syllable, a distinct sound? Initially, in places like Mesopotamia and Egypt, ideas and words dominated the meanings of pictographic representations and symbols. These first written scripts were pictographic systems.

Syallabic scripts were an advance in that the number of symbols in the system was reduced to just those needed to represent the major sounds of the spoken language. A syllabic script will typically have about 100 characters. Alphabetic scripts have even fewer characters (about 25) because each symbol represents a sound that is not necessarily an entire syllable; syllables are produced by combinations of letters. The Greek alphabet was the first complete alphabet. Where did it come from?

The four colors in this map indicate the locations of the four types of languages now spoken in the northeast Mediterranean region. The redish-brown af this map indicates locations where Indo-European languages are now spoken. Greek is classified as a member of the Indo-European  languages. (But see this for some evidence and an alternate view.) Greek has some similarities to Armenian and Indo-Iranian, but the general consensus is that these connections are not so strong as to warrant grouping these languages as part of a subgroup within Indo-European. There were close ties between speakers of Greek and speakers of Latin, but beyond some borrowing of words there is no special linguistic relationship between Greek and Latin within Indo-European. (source)

The earliest stages of the prehistory of Greek, extend back towards the estimated date of reconstructed Proto-Indo-European, at least 6500 years ago. The first Greek writing dates from the Mycenaean period about 1400 BCE. It is thought that Proto-Greek speakers first entered Southeastern Europe, (the Balkans) sometime between 2200 BC and 1600 BCE. Several Greek dialects that still exist today reflect a series of migrations of Proto-Greek speaking tribes into the region where modern Greek is still spoken. One such wave brought Ionic speakers into Attica as well as other parts of central Greece and the Peloponnesos in the second millennium BCE. Much latter, at the dawn of the Classical Greek period, Ionian Greeks of Asia Minor assembled the modern Greek alphabet.

When the Proto-Greek spreaking tribes reached the Mediterranean, they found a people with a high culture already present in the region, that I will call the Sea People. Examples of sophisticated writing belonging to the Sea People have been dated to as far back as 1700 BCE; when these mysterious Mediterranians first started to write is not known.

By about 1450 BCE Greek speaking people known as the Myceneans had adapted the Sea People script for the representation of spoken Greek. This early Greek script is called Linear B, and examples have been found associated with administrative centers throughout the Greek islands and on the mainland. Linear B was a syllabic script with about 90 symbols. Of most interest is the fact that Linear B has a complete set of symbols for vowels. Although the Ugartic alphabetic script (see below) dates back to about 1500 BCE, it did not have a vowel set.

Another major movement of Proto-Greek speaking tribes was the Dorian invasions of 12th century, in which West Greek speakers from the northwest moved into the Peloponnesos, leading to end of the Mycenaean civilization. The Dorians moved as well into many of the Aegean islands, including Crete. At about this time, Greek settlers arrived in Cyprus. From about 1100 BCE until as late as 300 BCE, a script related to Linear B was used in Cyprus. This script is known as Cypro-Minoan. It appears that use of Linear B died out and Greece entered into a dark age until the Classical period.

By the 9th century BCE there were Greek settlements in what we now call Syria. This is where the early alphabetic scripts that became Phoenician and Hebrew developed. From aound 1000 BC, the Phoenicians had replaced the Myceneans as the dominant traders of the Mediterranean. As shown in this map, Phoenician influence spread to Cyprus and Crete. Thus, by 900 BCE the Eastern Mediterranean was a region of over-lap between the Greek and Phoenician cultures. By the 8th century BCE several versions of Greek scripts were in use that used Phoenician characters. The Ionian version from Miletus had seven symbols for vowels. This inovation was possible because after assigning Phoenician alphabetic symbols to the common Greek consonant sounds, there were characters left over that could be assigned to vowels. There was no specified set of vowel characters in Phoenician script as in its closely related Hebrew script. Where did the idea of adding vowels to the Greek alphabet come from? Since Cypro-Minoan was used on Cyprus and elsewhere during this time, it seems logical to assume that the Ionians simply combined the Minoan script idea of a vowel set with the Phoenician alphabet, resulting in the first complete alphabet.

The 8th century BCE was a period of active Greek colonization, strengthening Greek all over the eastern Mediterranean, with colonists from different source localities transplanting their dialect abroad, sometimes with different dialects in neighboring settlements (as in Southern Italy, for instance). Initially, as in the Mycenean period, the new Greek scripts allowed trade and administration. Writing allowed for record keeping and communication about a small set of familiar trade and tax items. Eventually, new uses were found for the new alphabetic script, including uses that were impossible for the older syllabic scripts. When vowels were not used in the earlier alphabets (such as Phoenician script), a reader had to be able to guess the identity of words based on the clues provided by ambiguous consonantal spellings. A limited vocabulary of common items and contexts as well as pictographic hints made this a workable system. Consonant-only spelling had the advantage of brevity, which was important given the limitations of available writing materials. Incorporation of a complete vowel set into Ionian Greek allowed for less ambiguity in the identity of words. Word spelling became more comlicated as words lengthened, but it was now possible for writers to deal with an unlimited variety of abstract topics in a flexible way. A distant or later reader could be counted on to be able to recognize words by means of efficient decoding of the sounds indicated by the explicitly rendered vowels.

Whn wrds nly cntnd cnsnnts, wrd dntty ws trcky.

When words only contained consonants, determination of word identity was tricky. A literature of abstract philosophy which could pass down through the ages and spread geographically between cultures was made possible by the Ionian script. The Ionian vowel set slowly spread into other Greek dialects, being officially adopted in Athens right at the dawn of the the great Athenian flowering of philosophy in 400 BCE. The modern Greek alphabet made philosophy possible; it is no mystery that we view Greece as the origin of Western Philosophy. There were earlier philosophers, but the Greek language has acted as a memetic conduit for transmission of Greek thought through the ages.

Eventually, Alexander the Great became the vector by which the Greek language was spread to places like Alexandria, Egypt. In Egypt, availability of a convenient storage system for written philosophical and scientific writings allowed the great flowering of Greek thought to be preserved and passed on to the other great language of transmission, Aramaic. Alexandria was also the place that allowed the Hebrew Bible to be passed into Greek script, giving it the portability and durability that allowed it to become important in the Roman Empire.

The purple region in the map below shows a region of Afro-Asian languages (Semitic) in the Mideast, there are many more such languages in Africa. The Greeks are included as part of the large Indo-European super-culture that includes both a European western division and an Asiatic eastern divison (see the brown regions in the map below).

Both Greek and Hebrew history have been influenced by iteractions between "sea peoples" of the Mediterranean and peoples of the land. Greek history is full of the idea of migrations, waves of Greek invasion from inland areas to the coastal regions, where they interacted a highly civilized Mediterranean culture that had vowel-containing scripts already in use. Proto-Greeks were not the original inhabitants of Greece. Who were the mysterious "sea people" of the Eastern Mediterranean before the arrival of Indo-European?

The Hebrew culture is generally thought of as having formed between the great Egyptian and Mesopotamian centers of culture, but any analysis based only on a bipolar fertile-crescent view is overly simplistic. Again, we will investigate influences on the Mideast from sea-going people of the Mediterranean. Were the original people of the Eastern Mediterranean coast Caucasians (see next paragraph) or some other group?

As the above map suggests, another people who are classified as being members of a language group distinct from the Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic groups played an important role in the ancient Mideast. The Cacasians may have been the dominant culture in Mesopotamia before the arrival of Semitic people from the southwest. Eventually, the remnants of the Caucasians were restricted to a more northerly region between the Caspian and Black seas (black, in the map above). In this sense, the Caucasians provide a good example of how a people can be displaced from a geographical region by other cultures. Is it known who the indiginous people of Greece and western Asia Minor were? The green region in the map above represents a later invasion by a new group of Asian people, and does not concern us here. Indo-Europeans such as the Hittites came to occupy part of the region between Greece and Mesopotamia in the time period that concerns us here, but who was in places like Crete and Asia Minor before the Hittites?

Mediterranean peoples of an indiginous "sea-faring" culture shaped the Greeks when they came into the Mediterranean basin and began assimilating Mediterranean culture. Semitic people like the Hebrews were also shaped by contacts between Semitic peoples and the "Sea People". Of particular interest to both Greek and Hebrew cultural development is the common source of their written languages. What was the origin of their related alphabetic systems of writing? Usually, historical accounts stress that the Greek and Hebrew alphabets both came by way of the sea-going Phoenicians. However, the Phoenicians were late inheritors of the sea. Here is where we can trace the Atlantis myth into pre-Mycenean times.

The geographical location of Phoenicia is interesting, being at a place where Semitic, Caucasian, and Indo-European influences collided. There are also deeper layers to the story, since Semitic and Indo-European influences all converged on the geographical location of Phoenicia from outside. Who were the "original" people of this region before the Semitic and Indo-European influences came?

In searching for the origins of the people of the Mediteranean, we can start with the basic environmental conditions after the last glacial period. Archological investigation  has revealed the presense of artistic humans in the Mediterranean basin as far back as 35,000 years ago. However, the dramatic climate changes since the last period of glaciation makes it impossible for there to have been extensive cultural development or continuity in the Mediterranian during the past 35,000 years. The pattern has been one of relatively weak indiginous populationsthat were replaced by or assimilated into invading populations.

map source
http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/nerc.html

This map gives an estimate of vegetation cover at about 18,000 years ago during the arid period of full-glacial conditions. There was much less closed forest and more desert than at present. Evidence indicates that these extreamly arid climatic conditions extended to as late as 12,000 BCE. The whole period from about 21,000 - 14,000 was much colder and more arid than at present.

We could view this period as a kind of "dark age" for Mediterranean culture with a low population density that was due to the harse environmental conditions.
 
 
PAST
This map indicates vegetation cover and desert regions by 8,000 years ago. The archeological record of plant and animal domestication in Asia Minor dates to a period of climatic moderation with conditions warmer and moister than those of the present in many parts of the world.

This final map is for purposes of comparison, showing the areas of forest and other desert that would be present in the present-day world if humans had not altered them by agriculture and forestry. Although it represents a 'potential' state, it is nevertheless much as the world would actually have looked about 4,000-3,000 years ago, before agriculture became important in modifying vegetation cover in many regions.

See the web site of Jonathan M. Adams and "Global land environments since the last interglacial".

A sudden moderation of climatic conditions may have allowed the rapid spread of Indo-European  and other huntiner-gatherer tribes over large geographical areas. Rapid climatic shifts during the past 10,000 years may have given advantages to farming peoples, allowing a gradual spread of farming techniques outward from Asia Minor into Europe.

See "Did Indo-European Languages spread before farming?" by Jonathan Adams and Marcel Otte (http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/Indo2.html)

If we search around the Mediterranean for clues to the indigenous Eastern Mediterranean people that came before the Semitic and Indo-European invaders, we find a few scattered remnants of clues that speak of such a people who formed at least one more distinct language group. It has been suggested that the Etruscans must have been representatives of the so-called Mediterannean race which existed before Indo-Europeans came to the Eastern Mediterranean. It is thought that the cultural origins of the Etruscans can be traced to Asia Minor, somewhere between Syria and the Hellespont. Invaders like the Indo-European Hittites (who had arrived from Central Asia) participated the process of erasing evidence of Proto-Etruscan culture from the Eastern Mediterranean.

It is interesting that this part of the world was the source of major advances such as farming and iron working. We are interested in the idea that Proto-Etruscan culture or other elements of a lost Mediterannean people were involved in the development of another major advances towards our Western culture, the development of a complete alphabetic script. The remnants of early commentaries on the ancient languages of the Mediterranean indicate that the Proto-Etruscans had once spread by sea from Asia Minor through the Aegean Islands and on to Italy. Herodotus, wrote that the Etruscans migrated from Lydia (Asia Minor). Some ancient historians (e.g. Herodotus, Polibius and Tit Livy) noticed that the language of old inhabitants of Lemnos island in the Aegean Sea was similar to Etruscan. Unfortunately, we have no good inscripitions in an ancient Lemnos language. Etruscans had no connection with Indo-European family of languages, they spoke a language that was, maybe, the last survived form of the Pre-Indo-European population of Eastern Mediterranean region. (source)

One interpretation of the Atlantis myth is by way of associating the high Atlantian culture with Classical Greek memories of the earlier Mycenaean period.  However, evidence such as megalithic temples dating back some six thousand years  in places like Malta suggest a much earlier Mediterranean culture predating the pyramids by a thousand years and Stonehenge by two thousand. (source)

Is it possible that there was a Pre-Indo-European (this term is an over-simplification, since there were at least two other major cultures in the area, Semitic and Caucasian) population with a high culture that was the people of the Atlantis myth? Was some natural disaster such as a major volcanic eruption in the Mediterranean Sea the destroyer of of that high culture, creating a power vacuum into which Semitic and Indo-European peoples could advance? And most importantly, did the Pre-Indo-European "sea people" in any way play a role in important cultural advances such as the development of written language in Phoenicia?
 
A search for the archological remains of Troy provided an entry point into the world of the Aegean in pre-Mycenaean times and evidence for ancient Sea Peoples who conducted early trade by sea. Early occupation of the site now called Troy probably dates back to neolithic times, but a city was present as early as 3000-2550 BCE. The original city at Troy was built by people under the cultural influence that had spread out from the original source of agriculture in Asia Minor. How such pre-Greek cities fit into Aegean prehistory not clear. There are other important city sites along the western Anatolian coast, as well as on the large islands of the Aegean. (source)

Thermi on the island of Lesbos is a good example of a site indicating a maritime trade network involving Western Asia Minor ports. Certain types of terracotta figurines that are rare at Troy, are more common at Thermi where they were preferred to stone figurines that were popular in Troy at the same time. Metal items such as daggers, a spear, and a knife have been found in early city strata at Troy. There is little evidence of trade between Minoan Crete and Troy at the earliest levels of occupation at the Troy site.  This evidence is concistent with the idea that the earliest contacts between Asia Minor and Crete were by way of southern Asia Minor. Around 2500 BCE, recovered implements reveal more Aegean contacts with Troy: a steatite blossom bowl (Minoan), a spool-shaped pestle of marble (Helladic or Cycladic), and Melian obsidian. It seems that the main spread of contact from the origin of agriculture in Asia Minor to Minoan Crete may have been by way of southern sea route, rather than the northerly land arc over the top of the Aegean.

As mentioned above, Cyprus and its Cypro-Minoan script may have been an important link between east and west when the first complete alphabet was devised. What is the evidence for an early spread of the settled city life and agriculture from Asia Minor to Cyprus and other Mediterranean islands?

  Neolithic settlements in Cyprus at places like Khirokitia and Kalavassos show evidence of stone vessels and simple technologies. The settlement at Khirokitia dates to well before 6,000  BCE. It had about 2,000 in-
habitants, living in round houses. The early Khirokitians used stone tools and the presence of flakes of obsidian, which is not native to the non-volcanic island of Cyprus, is a sign of contact with other lands, probably Asia Minor (source). After about 5000 BCE pottery was used, reflecting the same cultural dlopments and transitions within early cities as seen in Asia Minor. Excavations at sites like Kalavassos suggest influences originating in Syria, Palestine or Asia Minor.

Around 4000 BCE the copper of the island began to be used. By 2500 BCE bronze age contacts with outside peoples and eventually the Greeks were common. This is the same time period that Troy shows signs of increasing sea trade. Thus, the earliest and strongest contacts between Crete and Asia Minor were probably by way of the mainland near Rhodes. Only later did longer, more extensive sea trading become common.

With the inovation of bronze and distant trade for tin, the copper was more extensively exploited bringing wealth to Cyprus. Trade was built up with the Near East, Egypt and the Aegean. After 1400  BCE, Mycenaeans from Greece reached Cyprus, perhaps first as merchants, then settlers. There was a period of cultural innovation with the development of the distinctive Cypro-Minoan script, advances in ceramics, strengthening of ties with the Greek civilisation. (source) The Cypro-Minoan script that developed during this period was used to write both early Greek and the local Cypriot non-Indo-European language. During the 12th and 11th centuries several waves of Achaean Greeks settled on the island bringing with them their religion, their customs and the island was progressively hellenised. This was a "dark age" in the Greek world as new invaders disrupted previously established patterns of trade and city-state administration. From around 1000 BCE Phoenician influence grew as they built their extensive trade system in the Mediterranean. The 8th century B.C. was a period of great prosperity on Cyprus and about the time that the Phoenician script was adopted by the Greeks in places like Asia Minor. Use of the Cypro-Minoan script continued into this time.
(source)

Minoans (more information here)

There is evidence of neolithic settlement of Crete about the same time as for Cyprus, around 6000 BCE, as the grain growing culture from Asia Minor spread. As mentioned above, the best guess is that the first spread of agriculture and city living to Crete was by way of the shortest sea route between Crete and Southwest Asia Minor.

There was a period of about 2-3,000 years before a high civilization developed on Crete. Our search for the Atlantis civilization falls into the time period from about 4,000 to 1,200 BCE. The Minoan civilization (3000-1400 BCE) blossomed in the Aegean Sea, starting at about the same time that Egypt and Mesopotamia were forming high cultures. (source) It seems possible that the idea of a written script to represent spoken words spread from one original source, possibly from Mesopotamia by land to Egypt and by sea to Crete. Who were the peoples who lived in the Eastern Mediterranean with the Minoans?  The Minoans were one of several cultures of the Aegean region; there was also the Cycladic island culture, the Mycenaean Greeks who originated on mainland Greece, and the early people of the western Asia Minor coast. Although trade between these cultures was possible, in the earliest times it was probably limited and cultural isolation and diversification was possible rather than the formation of far-flung empires. The Atlantian myth of an island culture fits into this kind of early Aegean existence rather than the later period of spreading cultural influence seen at the peak of Mycenaean Greece.

Written language is one of the key elements of high culture. The Minoan Linear A script was already flourishing by 1750 BCE; it has not been deciphered because nobody is familiar with the spoken language of these early Sea People.  A later  script, Linear B, was used as a form of Greek transcription developed after Minoan interactions with the early Greeks of the Aegean. Was Greek memory of the Minoans the source of the Atlantian myth? Possibly not. Other Greek myths have been tentatively linked to the palace culture of Minoan Crete. The close contacts between Greece and Crete reflected in the spread of use of Linear B to administrative centers throughout Mycenaean Greece, makes it unlikely that Crete could represent some "lost civilization". The civilization of Minoan Crete was not lost as far as the Greeks were concerned.

Where else can we look for Atlantis? Minoan Civilization may have peaked after the explosion of the volcanic island of Thera (1600 BCE) suggesting the pleasingly romantic idea that the Minoans may have been a relatively minor civilization under the shadow of a greater Theran civilization until the destruction of Thera. Is the Atlantian legend a memory of the lost Theran civilization? There were impressive cities on There before the volcano exploded. The earliest Greeks in the Aegean may have only known Theran civilization from the outside as relative barbarians, resulting in the myth of a great island culture that was lost.

 Minoan culture "Snake Goddess."
"Possibly when the Minoan script Linear A is deciphered a  different view on the Minoan civilization will emerge, but until then  the visual evidence alone describes an attractive, easy-going  society centered on large labyrinthine palace-like buildings which  seem to have served primarily, judging from the huge storage  areas, as collection and distribution centers for a well-organized  system of local agricultural production, and as the residence of  local leaders and, possibly, artists and craftspeople. Who the  leaders were is unknown, but circumstantial evidence indicates  that women played a dominant role in Minoan religion and perhaps also in Minoan society." (source)

Conclusions
The Minoans were a branch of indiginous Mediterranean people pre-dating the Indo-Europeans and Semites who came later to the Eastern Mediterranean. It seems possible that legends of Atlantis were based on the early high culture that developed on Crete and other islands. Even if the Minoans were not the mythical Atlantians, this culture had its own unique form of writing which is known to have continued into the period of Classical Greece and overlapped with the origins of the modern Greek alphabet and Ionian Greek philosophy.

The Semitic Alphabet
Mesopotamian culture is usually described as starting around 3500 BCE in the lower Euphrates valley. Early pictographic writing and cuneiform seem to have been inovations of people living in Mesopotamia. Around 2400 BCE, Semites finally prevailed over the indiginous people of the lower Euphrates, marking the initiation of a period of inovations in the use of scripts to represent spoken Semitic languages. The cultural tide shifted again and again in Mesopotamia, and the exchange of ideas between peoples speaking many languages was probably important in the development of scripts that were easy to use and adapt to new uses. The exchange of ideas was via both trade and invasion. Around 2000 BCE  Caucasian "mountain people" invaded Mesopotamia. This is also the time of invasions by other Semitic people like the Amorites who gained control of the coastal region we now call Syria. This was apparently the culture of the Biblical Abraham. By 1600 BCE the Indo-European Hittites came as far south as Babylon. It is interesting that invasion and trade corresponds with the appearance of knowledge of chariots for warfare, iron working and even use of more modern forms of writing in Mesopotamia. We can speculate that these inovations were picked up and spread by invaders such as the Hittites and Amorites from various sources.

The mixing of diverse cultures was important for the development of cultural elements such as scripts. In the more isolated Egyptian and Minoan civilizations, stasis rather than inovation was dominant. The most concise scripts (fewest characters) were developed in the Mideast by Semitic people. The idea of mixing cultural memories is a usful metaphor for the view of physiological memory that is a main focus of this web site. Conscious brain processes allow people to mix knowledge from multiple sense modalities and from various experiences distributed in time. This is also a good metaphor for stimulating further efforts towards cooperation and consilience within the Science of Mind and between science and society at large.

The central location of the Semitic people who were the inventors of alphabetic scripts made for an interesting type of cultural resiliency. Invasions and cultural influences from outside never dislodged the Semitic culture from Palestine and Syria once they had established themselves there. Around 2000 BCE, the invading Indo-European forces from the north (if we allow ourselves to use the term Indo-European for the highly assimilated Hittites) played a role in directing Semitic peoples to the south, into Egypt, setting the stage for Abraham's people to "reside in Egypt." When the southern Egyptians eventually drove out the Semitic invaders of Northern Egypt, the Egyptians moved further north only to find themselves running into the Hittite empire (about 1400 BCE). What was even worse for Egypt, "sea people" from the north invaded Egypt itself, greatly weakening Egypt, allowing Moses to lead his Egyptianified Semitic tribe to the north, eventually to form the Kingdom of Israel about 1000 BCE, with the help of the new Semitic sea power, the Phoenicians. When the Israelites reached Judea, they were confronted by several strong Semitic tribes such as the Moabs (southeast) and the Phoenicians (northwest). The Kingdom of Israel was also confined by the Philistines to the southwest and Mesopotamian forces to the northeast. The nomadic Israelites adopted much of the culture of the local people, including the Phoenician-like alphabet of the Hebrews. The Israelites began to record their cultural mythology in writing, adapting the stories from their oral tradition to a written format. The entry of the nomadic Hebrews into urban existence was made possible by partial assimilation into the indigenous urban culture. The Biblical story of David is one of partial assimilation into the ways of the Philistines but with the priests managing to form an aliance with David so as to bring the religion of Moses into an urban kingdom. The Israelites had picked up some foriegn ideas from Egypt that made them hard to fit in with the local Semitic peoples of Palestine, cultural distinctions that had long-lasting implications for the transient kingdom of Israel.

Egyptian influence: magic in the Moses stories
The Eqyptians tended to restrict their heiroglyphic writings to a secret of the priesthood. There were forms of Egyptian writing that were more widely used, but as far as we know the South was not a source of great inovation in language and writing. However, while clay tabletswere preserved to the north and the climate of Egypt allowed preservation of Egyptian inscriptions on less durable substrates, the area in between may have simply failed to preserve extensive writings on substrates like animal skin. It is possible that there were early forms of the stories of the Hebrew that were put into writing, but which were lost to us. One Southerly influence which had important implications for the future of Western Civilization was in the area of religion and mysiticism. Moses comes "out of Africa" with magic snake staphs and a tradition of monotheism. This Egyptian cultural bias included an interest in immortality that was reflected in the Eden myth and also in the flowering of Christianity.

The Proto-Semitic people who became the Phoenicians probably started arriving near the Eastern Mediterranean coast about 3000 BCE. After a period of cultural assimilation with the indigenous people, what we now know as the Semitic people were in control. The nature of the local inhabitans who were displaced or assimilated by the Phoenicians is an important issue. We know that there was a copper-using and sea-going culture in the Eastern Mediterranean going back to the 4th century BCE. It can be expected that the Semites learned about sea-going trade from these indiginous sea-going people, and later took over as the major traders in the Mediterranean when other dominant "sea people" like the Mycaenean Greeks declined. The Proto-Phoenicians had established commercial and religious connections with Egypt which are documented in records of the Egyptian Old Kingdom. The forest resources of Lebannon were important to Egypt. It is likely that the Semites had migrated to Asia from Africa and that they simply maintained ties with people to the south that they were familiar with. The Phoenician city of Byblos seems to have been a center for development of the Phoenician alphabet. The name "byblos" itself speaks to us of close trade ties to Egypt and the city's role as a major source of papyrus.

After the invasion of the region that was to become Phoenicia by the Amorites (c. 2200 BC) the Proto-Phoenicians were linked within a larger Mesopotamian cultural environment that included cuneiform writing as one of its key cultural elements. (source) The Phoenicians had a language and culture like those of other Semitic peoples in the general area (the Canaanites of North Palestine) but they were different in the fact that they were greatly influenced by "sea people" and became great traders of the Mediterranean and beyond.

Early forms of writing developed in both the Nile and Euphrates river valleys. Although the Phoenicians used cuneiform (Mesopotamian writing), they also produced a script of their own, which showed Egyptian influences. An important advance in writing was the use of letters to represent the fundamental sounds of a spoken language and the transcription of spoken word sounds into written words composed of letters of an alphabet. This is a much more powerful system of printing than the use of pictographs to represent entire words or the more complicated syllabic scripts that came before alphabetic scripts. The origin of alphabetic letters coresponding to a basic set of sounds is an important advance, allowing a script to use many fewer symbols than is found in a syllabic or pictographic writing system. The first steps towards this inovation appear in the lower Euphrates about the time that Semitic invaders arrived there. The oldest of the known written Semitic languages, Akkadian, was the vehicle of an early literature of folk tales written in syllabic cuneiform.

Why did the Semites so vigorously develop the idea of a more concise script that would exist outside of the familiar methodology of cuneiform and clay tablets?  Other cultures such as the Egyptian and that of the original developers and users of cuneiform may have lacked a social system that promoted the spread of the secret of writing beyond select administrative and priest castes. The Semites seemed driven towards broader literary and trade-related uses of written language, necessitating a more easy to use script. An early version of the Phoenician alphabetic script of 22 letters was used at Byblos as early as the 15th century BCE. This method of writing, later adopted by the Greeks, is the ancestor of the modern Roman and other Western alphabets. It also influenced Aramaic and Arabic scripts which later played important roles in the transmission of our Western cultural heritage. However, we cannot entirely avoid wondering about the possibility of early interactions between Minoan Crete and the Phoenicians. From 2000 to 1600 BCE was a period of growing trade and colonization by the Minoans, and it is to be expected that there would have been the oportunity for the Phoenicians to become aware of the Minoan scripts and their explicit representation of five vowel sounds by distinct symbols. We can only speculate as to why this Minoan inovation never had greater influence on the development of the primarily consonantal Phoenician alphabet.
 

Ugaritic text (image of Ugaritic cuneiform, left) was originally written in an alphabetic cuneiform script that was different from the earlier Akkadian cuneiform. The Canaanites of Phoenicia used an as yet undeciphered syllabic script, the Proto-Byblian, in the 2nd millennium BCE. More southerly Semitic speaking people like those of Palestine and the Sinai Peninsula employed another undeciphered Sinaitic script,  which may have included developments in the direction of alphabetic writing. Alphabetic scripts developed among the Western Semites, not the Eastern Semites who more closely interacted with the high culture heart of Lower Mesopotamia.

Ugartic Script
Large numbers of Ugartic tablets were discovered in the ruins of a temple in Ras Shamara. The Ugartic cuneiform alphabetic texts at this site date from about 1,400 BCE to around 1,200 BCE ending with the destruction of the city of Ugarit. The Ugartic script mixed together ideas from both Akkadian syllabic cuneiform and early Phoenician alphabets. (source: David Myriad Rosenbaum) The Semitic scripts such as Ugartic are consonantal alphabets with only limited means to indicate the vowel sounds of the spoken words represented by the script. Either the stucture of the script itself or other cultural restrictions seem to have focused use of the script in temple literature on representations of well known subject matters such as the myths and legends from the oral traditions of the Mideast. While it was possible to use earlier forms of writing for philosophical writing, a literature of speculative philosophy did not fully develop and spread widely until after the Ionian Greeks had the first complete alphabet.

The "lost" Ugartic script and all surviving semitic alphabets are related to the Phoenician alphabet that evolved near the port of Byblos. All the European alphabets are descendants of the Phoenician script by way of Greek. The Asiatic alphabets of languages like Arabic evolved by way of Aramaic forms of the Phoenician script.

The Arab "Ras Shamra" was known as the ancient Ugarit in Egyptian and Hittite documents. Located on the north Syrian coast near the island of Cyprus, this archeological site has several major strata. The earliest neolithic level is characterized by the development of agriculture and the making of polished stone implements as described above for the more southerly Sha`ar Hagolan site. Ancient Ugarit disappears from the historical record about 1200 BCE., when the Sea Peoples were attacking coastal areas from Syria to Egypt. The city had relations with Egypt during the time of Moses. A library of clay tablets was found associated with a temple of Baal. These texts were written with a cuneiform alphabet of about thirty signs and the spoken languages that were represented by this script were Semitic languages related to Hebrew.

The thirty Ugartic characters were consonantal, except that three could indicate the type of vowel (a, i [or, e], or u) occurring after the special aleph symbol. The oldest known extensive inscriptions (about 1000 BCE) in the Phoenician alphabetic writing date from after the time of the Ras Shamra library. As mentioned above, there is sketchy evidence of more southerly sources of parallel (to Ugartic) alphabet development, but it was probably poorly preserved due to use of media besides baked clay tablets. It is also possible that the main use of the early alphabet outside of temple locations like Ugarit was for transient administrative and trade documents as was the case in Crete. After the violent destruction of the Ras Shamra site, use of the Ugarit alphabet apparently declined while use of the Phoenician script grew along with the expanding Phoenician trade empire. (source)

Tablets recovered from the ruins a high priest's house at Ras Shamra provide inight into the "seductive allure" of the mythology of Baal. Israelite priests had to struggle against assimilation of their people into this dominant religious system of the region. For the people, Baal was a god of natural forces like the seasonal rains that were depended on for grain crops and animal feed. Baal was the key god at had to be honored in order to assure rain and life.

In the Biblical book of Hosea there is reaction against the assimilation of Israelites into the culture of Baal; women having children by "outside" men and religious practices honoring Baal. The god of Israel is depicted as saying, "I will make you forget your idols, it is I that will provide the rain." It has been suggested that sexual activity was an integral part of some worship of Baal. The Ugartic texts indicate that the religion of Baal was less austere and cerebral than the religion that the priests of Israel tried to craft. When invaders called the "sea people" caused the destruction of major Baal-oriented temples in urban centers, it provided the chance for the priests of Israel and Judea to craft and spread a different kind of religion.

Phoenician trade in the Mediterranian

The rise of Phoenicia
The area around Phoenicia was invaded by the Hyksos (18th century BC), the Egyptians (16th century BC), the Hittites (14th century BC), Egypt again (1290-79 BC), and finally the Sea Peoples from the north and west. In the power vacuum after the disruption of the Egyptian, Hittite, and Mycaenean powers, the Phoenicians established a dominant role in Mediterranian trade. The Pheonicians were able to move outward into a Mediterranenan environment previously dominated by other cultures that had been disrupted by natural disasters (Thera) and Indo-European invaders like the Dorian Greeks. It is the later part of Pheonician existence that we know the most about (see map above). Unfortunately, the first part of their existence and their early interactions with "Sea People" are lost in the mists of the past. What was the early Greek and Minoan influence on the early Phoenicians?

Before the thirteenth century BCE, sites along the eastern Mediterranean coast traded distinctive ceramic vessels that were made in Mycenaean Greece. Then there was an end to this late Bronze Age trade. Sites on Cyprus and in places like Israel then show local imitations of the lost imports. At some sites in Israel, the local imitation Greek pottery is followed by a  "Philistine" pottery. source

Some of the invasions of Troy seem to be related to the movement of destructive Sea Peoples as they entered into the Mediterranian basin and moved on towards Cyprus, Syria and Egypt. Cyprus was part of the link between the
Aegean and Canaan. From sites in Cyprus, Sea People may have attacked Egypt and places like Ugarit. (source)

The question remains, what early influences came from the sea to the Semitic people of the Mideast? Physical artifacts such as pottery styles tell us of extensive contacts between the Greeks who used Linear B script and the Semitic people who were experimenting with alphabetic scripts. Unfortunately, evidence of Minoan inscriptions in the Mideast is rare.

Conclusions.
We bagan this digression into language with two guiding questions: 1) What was the script that the Ten Commandments were originally written in? and 2) What was the origin of the Greek Alphabet?

The modern Greek alphabet arose through the interactions of at least three major cultural groups: Indo-Europeans, Semites and the original "Sea People" who included the Minoans. The Minoans were the first to use a script with a complete set of vowels. The Phoenicians gave the Greeks their consonental alphabet. The Greeks combined the Phoenician alphabet with the idea of a complete vowel set and produced the first complete alphabetic script. The modern Greek alphabet made more convenient certain ways of using written language and opened the way to a new literature of speculative Greek Philosophy. The Ionian Greeks lived in places that has once been the sites of Minoan colonies and the Cypro-Minoan script was in use when the Ionians were developing their alphabet.

The historical development of the Greek alphabet indicates the importance of cultural memory and the mixing of ideas from different cultures. What if Cypro-Minoan had not survived through the Greek "dark age" around 1000 BCE? Would the later Greeks have thought to include vowels in their script without the Minoan example in their minds? We must also respect the lesson of cultural momentum that exists in the story of how modern Greek arose. Why didn't Greek speaking people adopt the Phoenician script earlier than they did? Why were the Semites so resistant to the use of vowels? Was a concise consonantal script somehow natural for Semitic speaking people while inclusion of vowel characters in a larger syllabic script was natural for the Minoans? In the absence of the Greek Indo-Europeans to mix the Semetic alphabet with the Minoan idea of vowels, would the development of a complete alphabet and the flowering of science and philosophy that it made possible have been delayed for thousands of years? The unlikely origin of the Greek alphabet at least suggests the beginning of an answer to the mystery of why Western Civilization arose in Greece when it did: the early Greek philosophers were the first in the world to have access to a modern, complete alphabet. They could begin a process by which one generation of thinkers could record and pass abstract philosophical speculations on to future generations of thinkers. This was a new type of human knowledge and thinking beyond that of oral myths and folk traditions.

When the Israelites assimilated into the culture of the lands south of Syria, they formed alliances with the Phoenicians and other people who has adopted the alphabetic script of Byblos. This script could be used to write down representations of the spoken Hebrew language. When the oral traditions of the Israelites were written down, the priests used the Phoenician alphabetic characters. It is possible that there were earlier attempts to record the story of Abraham in a Sinaic scrpt, but no record of this has survived the cultural assimilayion of Moses' people into more northerly culture. If this was the end of the story of Biblical writings, it is doubtful that Western Society would have arisen as we know it. But Hellenization reached the Hebrews and the Old Testament was translated into Greek. Eventually, Hellenized cities from Egypt to Israel to Asia Minor to Athens were the environment within which Christianity could evolve and begin to integrate itself into the Roman Empire.

It is often posed as a mystery why the Romans were mostly indifferent to the prospect of continuing the liveliness of Greek philosophical investigation. Why did memory of the Classical Greeks largely fade away in the Western World of the early Middle Ages? What role did Christianity and Islam play in the recovery of the Greek philosophical spirit? We will return to these questions after first exploring the transition from the myths of the oral traditions that influenced Western Thought to the philosophical tradition that was formulated by the Classical Greeks.

 More on language origins  including images of the Linear B, Cypro-Minoan, Linear A, Phoenician and Greek scripts.