Three Scriptures with the Cretans

Crete-Three Scriptures

British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans has the merit of having discovered and categorized Scriptures in use in Crete and mainland Greece between 2000 and 1150 BC. He distinguished three types found in "hieroglyphic writing", the oldest, and "linear", the next two writings. The first Scripture presented itself in the form of drawings, and other two were characterized by a series of signs more schematized which formed a continuous line.

The first type of writing, dating to the earliest period of Cretan civilization (2000-1650 BC) is documented by the famous Phaistos disk (clay), preserved in the Museum at Heraklion, the capital of Crete.
The discovery of linear B revolutionized all current opinions on Greek civilization and on its relationship with that of Crete: until then, indeed, it was believed that the Greeks had never dominated Crete.

The second type, which in recent years have been interesting proposals of deciphering, made to appear around 1750 BC and looks like a simplification of the hieroglyphs above, reduced to simple contours. The script found on tablets coming largely from Haghia Triada, near Phaistos, was named by Evans "linear A".

The third type (which according to Evans would have appeared around 1400 BC, but which today we tend to think it is at least a century later) is a syllabic writing called "linear B". We are now able to read thanks to the ingenious interpretive work of English Michael Ventris: after sixteen years of study, he found that writing "hid" a Greek language; before they adopted the Phoenician alphabet, around 800 BC, the Greeks, between 1400 and 1200 BC, had thus already used this kind of linear writing.

What until then had been called "Aegean-Cretan civilization", or "Minoan", the sequence of two different civilizations was revealed, that of the pre-Cretan Greek (Minoan) and that of the Mycenaean Greek.