Page 298 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

today, but that normally called Minoan B, recently deciphered
by the late Michael Ventris. It was not an alphabetic but a syl­

labic script, but the language it was used to write is recognizably
Greek. It has long been believed that Greek tablets written in
Minoan B script antedated, in Knossos, the Greek conquest of the

city. The archaeological evidence for this has recently been chal­
lenged (see L. R. Palmers forthcoming Myceneans and Mi-
noans), but in any case there has never been any suggestion that
the rulers of Knossos before the Greek conquest spoke Greek.

Minoan B, as a script, developed as a simplified form of the
so-called Minoan A script. The exciting work of deciphering Mi­
noan A (on a foundation of our gradually increasing knowledge

of Minoan B) is going on at the moment. All that can be safely
said at this stage is that the language written in Minoan A was
not Greek. The assumption must be that it was the language spo­
ken in Crete before the Greek conquest, and it is in this chap­

ter called Old Cretan.