The Eteocretan (i.e True Cretan) language, also called Minoan, was the non-Hellenic language of Crete, before it was invaded by Greek tribes, spoken by the Minoans until ca. 1420 BC, when it was mostly displaced by Mycenaean Greek. The Eteocretans are mentioned in Homer's Odyssey and by Strabo as living on southern Crete, alongside Kydones in the west (according to Strabo also indigenous) and Greek Achaeans and Dorians in the east. Greece, formally called the Hellenic Republic (Greek: Ελληνική Δημοκρατία), is a country in the southeast of Europe on the southern tip of the Balkan peninsula. ... Greece and Crete Crete, sometimes spelled Krete (Greek Κρήτη / Kriti) is the largest of the Greek islands and the fifth largest in the Mediterranean Sea. ... Map of Minoan Crete The Minoans were a pre-Hellenic Bronze Age civilization in Crete in the Aegean Sea, prior to Helladic or Mycenaean culture (i. ... (Redirected from 1420 BC) Centuries: 16th century BC - 15th century BC - 14th century BC Decades: 1470s BC 1460s BC 1450s BC 1440s BC 1430s BC - 1420s BC - 1410s BC 1400s BC 1390s BC 1380s BC 1370s BC Events and Trends Crete conquered by Mycenae (approximately 1420 BC) - start of the... Map of Bronze Age Greece as described in Homers Iliad Mycenaean is the most ancient known form of the Greek language, spoken in Mycenae and on Crete in the 16th to 11th centuries BC, before the Dorian invasion. ... Bust of Homer in the British Museum For other uses, see Homer (disambiguation). ... The Odyssey (ΟΔΥΣΣΕΙΑ) is the second of the two great Greek epic poems ascribed to Homer, the first of which is the Iliad. ... Strabo (squinty) was a term employed by the Romans for anyone whose eyes were distorted or deformed. ... This article is about the ancient people of the Achaeans. ... The Dorians were one of the ancient Hellenic (Greek) tribes acknowledged by Greek writers. ...

Very little is known about Eteocretan except that it may be the language used on the Linear A tablets. It is generally described as non-Indo-European or rather pre-Indo-European. The late Prof. Cyrus Gordon, better known for his work on Ugaritic, argued that it was a Semitic language closely related to Phoenician, but his attempted decipherment has not been accepted by other linguists. There also seem to be some similarities with the Phrygian language, an Indo-European language once spoken in Phrygia. Linear A etched on tablets found in Akrotiri, Santorini. ... Some archaeologists and ethnographers use the term Old Europe to characterize the autochthonous (aboriginal) peoples who were living in Neolithic southeastern Europe before the immigration of Indo-European peoples (for this reason also called Pre-Indo-European). ... The Ugaritic language is known to us only in the form of writings found in the lost city of Ugarit since its discovery by French archaeologists in 1928. ... The Semitic languages are a family of languages spoken by more than 250 million people across much of the Middle East, where they originated, and North and East Africa. ... Phoenician was a language originally spoken in the coastal region then called Phoenicia /Canaan (now Lebanon, coastal Syria and northern Israel ). Phoenician is a Semitic language of the Canaanite subgroup, closely related to Hebrew and Aramaic. ... The Phrygian language was the Indo-European language of the Phrygians, people that migrated from Thrace to Asia Minor around 1200 BC. Phrygian is attested by two corpora, one from around 800 BC and later (Paleo-Phrygian), and then after a period of several centuries from around the beginning of... Proto-Indo-European Indo-European studies The Indo-European languages include some 443 (SIL estimate) languages and dialects spoken by about three billion people, including most of the major language families of Europe and western Asia, which belong to a single superfamily. ... In antiquity, Phrygia was a kingdom in the west central part of the Anatolian highlands, part of modern Turkey. ...

Despite the fall of the Minoan civilization, inscriptions in Eteocretan survive dating from the 7th century BC to the 3rd century BC, typically written in the local archaic Greek alphabet and the Ionian Greek alphabet. Five inscriptions have been found that are surely Eteocretan, two in Driros and three in Praisos in the Cretan prefecture of Lasithi. There are several other inscriptions that might be Eteocretan. The origin of the term delta comes from a vicious attacking toad, last sighted near IIT Bombay. ... Ionian Islands Ionia (Greek Ιωνία) was an ancient region of western coastal of Anatolia (now in Turkey). ... Lasithi is a prefecture of Greece on the island of Crete. ...

External links

• Eteocretan language homepage