From: lip@s1.gov (Loren I. Petrich)
Subject: Re: more Minoan stuff
Organization: LLNL
Date: Mon, 7 Sep 1992 07:26:43 GMT

In article <2AA6C85F.15212@news.service.uci.edu> cortese@skid.ps.uci.edu (Janis Maria Cortese) writes:
>I'm still deep in the pool of Minoan studt into which I seem to have
>dived, and I just wanted to post a few more references that I've checked
>out:

	[Long list deleted...]

	Any opinion of Marija Gimbutas's books?

	[The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe, The Language of the
Goddess, The Civilization of the Goddess]

	I can't resist the plug here :-)

	She discusses Minoan art in several places, and compares it to
Old European art; "Old Europe" is her term for pre-Kurgan Neolithic
and Copper Age Europe. Some of the stylistic similarities are quite
striking, especially to Southeastern European art (Vinca, Karanovo,
Cucuteni-Tripolye, etc.). The first of these books is about
Southeastern Europe, while the other two take a pan-European view
(yes, she mentions some Celtic, Germanic, Baltic, and Slavic mythology
in her cross-cultural comparisons). _Language_ is an interpretation of
the symbolism, while _Civilization_ gives a lot of archeological
background info. Both volumes border on the encyclopedic and one
sometimes wishes for more detailed exploration of some areas.

	In the earlier part of her career, before about 1970, she had
become greatly respected for her work on the Kurgan cultures of South
Russia and nearby areas (4500-2500 BCE); she proposed that these were
very likely the speakers of the ancestor of the Indo-European
languages. These were apparently the first of the great horse-riding
nomadic hordes; they overran much of Eastern Europe, which was not
very well militarized at the time.

	After that, a lot of her archeological colleagues became
turned off by her interest in the belief systems of the people she
studied; many of them tended to a nuts-and-bolts (cute anachronism)
view of archeology. She claims to have lost many professional friends.
My suspicion is because her proposals seem too romantic for her
colleagues' tastes; I've never seen much inhibition about speculations
on the Paleolithic "Venus figurines" ("Earth Mother", proposed by
Eleanor Gadon, seems more appropriate).

>Ain't living near a university library great?  I get to paw through all
>this junk for NOTHING!!!! 

	And so do I, at Berkeley, despite it taking nearly 2 hours to
get there from Livermore (1 hour by bus, 1/2 hour by BART, then either
a ratty old school bus or a walk uphill). I have plenty of
research-related excuses to go there :-)

	[on how JMC doesn't look Northern European but rather
Mediterranean, like those Minoan ladies]

	For my part, all those Minoan ladies look a lot like Marina
Sirtis (Lt. Deanna Troi on STTNG) to me. [She's of Greek ancestry, not
surprisingly]

	[JMC liking hot and dry climates]

	Well, the Mediterranean can get hot and dry in the summer,
courtesy of winds blowing from over the Sahara.

>I'm not a believer in reincarnation (There isn't enough data to draw a
>conclusion; making up my mind one way or another without reliable data
>would be unethical -- to use a scientific definition of ethical), but I
>sometimes wonder where all the images I get in my mind when I think
>about this stuff come from.  Is there a reason WHY sacral horn-shaped
>things usually pop up in my dreams?  The damned things just feel like
>home.  Why do I imagine falling asleep at the foot of a throne that
>looks a hell of a lot like the one in the throne room at Knossos?  Why
>was the labrys such an evocative symbol for me, even before I knew what
>it meant?  

	Any opinions on Minoan female fashion?

	I find the combination of long, fancy skirts and bare breasts
rather curious. I hope Madonna doesn't hear about it :-):-).

	Minoan male fashion?

	I'm not sure I want to dress in a loincloth skimpier than my
undies :-).

>I'll stop blathering now.  I'm just VERY HAPPY to find something that
>feels like home, and I guess I'm bubbling it at you people.  Oh, well.
>Either you duck or get it slung at you!

	That's OK.

	One of my interests in the Minoans is what language they
spoke. I've been working on-and-off on that question, by rather
indirect means. One way is to look for non-Indo-European vocabulary in
Greek, and looking for non-IE patterns in Greek place names. This kind
of detective work is like noticing that a lot of Southwest US place
names don't look very "English" -- they have "El" or "La" or "Los" or
"Las" or "San" or "Santa" in front, and they very often end in "e" or
"o" or "a" or "n". They even have some sort of "agreement rules"; -s
is followed by -s, and an -a is often followed by another -a. One can
conclude that much of the area was once ruled by some people who spoke
some language other than English. In this example, it is easy to place
the language -- Spanish. But for the pre-Greek language, the job is
much harder. Though one can find lots of -nthos and -a/essos, -ana,
-ene, -yna, and other such endings, beyond that it is rather
difficult. The most one can say with confidence is that the pre-Greek
(and presumably Minoan) language was almost certainly neither
Indo-European nor Semitic nor Egyptian. Though IE languages are
typically rich in derivational suffixes, they don't seem to have any
clear non-Greek cognates. I don't think that there are many Semitic or
Egyptian derivational suffixes (judging from my limited knowledge of
them). Furthermore, many of these pre-Greek words seem to be of
Mediterranean vegetation (hyakinthos, narkissos, terebinthos, elaia
[olive], ...), and these are not very good for judging linguistic
affinity. Proper names, like names of non-IE deities like Athena or
Artemis, are also not very good, due to the lack of semantic
constraints.

	The hypothesis I'm trying to check right now is that pre-Greek
was a relative of the Northeast Caucasian languages. The Russian
linguists Diakonov and Starostin propose that many Greek words, like
_purgos_ ("tower") and _selas_ ("light") (> _selana_ > _selene_,
"Moon") are of NEC origin. They propose that Hurrian-Urartian
(Anatolia, ca. 1500-1000 BCE) and Etruscan are also NEC languages.
Starostin proposes that the NEC languages and the Abkhazo-Adyghian
languages of the Caucasus form a group of North Caucasian languages,
which he proposes to be related to Sino-Tibetan, Yeniseian (after the
Siberian river), Basque, Burushaski (of Afghanistan), and Na-Dene
(northern North America).

	What is interesting about this "Sino-Caucasian" family is that
some of its members, such as Basque, Etruscan, Hurrian-Urartian, and
pre-Greek (if my hypothesis is correct) are in areas that were later
swamped or dominated by Indo-European speakers. In particular, Marija
Gimbutas discusses not only the Minoans, but also the Basques and the
Etruscans as examples of pre-IE cultures; here is possible linguistic
evidence that they were here first :-)

/Loren
From: radzy@hpcc01.corp.hp.com (Lynne Radzykewycz)
Date: Fri, 4 Sep 1992 21:13:45 GMT
Subject: Re: How 'bout some *new* pagan music?
Organization: the HP Corporate notes server