Greek civilization originated on Crete with the Minoan civilization. The Minoans eventually travelled to the mainland of Europe (modern day Greece) and these mainland Greeks founded Mycenae. After some time, the Mycenaeans travelled back to Crete to utterly destroy the Minoan civilization.
IIRC the original Greek linear-B writing indeed originated from the Phoenician writing system somewhere around the Mycenaean period (somewhere around 1100-800 B.C. I believe). I don't know if the Minoans had a writing system; I believe they did have some sort of inventory list as Faceman described but this still more or less worked like the Middle Eastern writing (I don't know what it's called in English; here in the Netherlands it's called the "spijkerschrift" --> roughly translated the "nail-writing system"). Prehistory did end with the coming of this writing system, however; the Minoan culture was definitely the one pushing the Greek into the light of civilization.
Rebuttal from my side:
Quote:
Originally posted by Faceman:
Dead Wrong!
Aineias shows up on several occasions in the Iliad always mentioning him as the hero "second only to Hector among the Trojans" he even gets in a battle with Achill which is about to turn out lethal for both of them before Poseidon steps in and saves Aineias.
Many historians believe that Homer was somehow connected to the family of Aineias because several times he mentions that Aineias will become the ruler of new Troy (i.e. rebuilt after the war). This is why Aineias became the founding hero of many a city in their myths because thus they could claim to be the new Troy. The Aeneias cult finally expanded westwards and arrived at Rome where Aeneas was believed to be the founding hero (like a son of Odysseus was) long before the story of Romulus and Remus was thought up. Later they harmonised the myths and Aeneias thus became the ancestor of the Roman twins.
In Vergils Aeneis only the chapter about Dido (in Carthago) is made up by himself. Everything else is part of the great number of myths that existed about Aeneias at that time.
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While you truthfully point out that Aeneas is in fact a 'large' (or mediocre at worst) Trojan character in the Iliad, I beg to differ about his part in the story. After all it isn't even accepted if the whole person we know as Homerus has ever lived. For a fact, there are numerous clues that make us believe the Iliad has been changed in the course of years. An example: the Dark Ages of the Greek civilization (800-500 B.C. I believe) was a period of decline of population, battles between the cities in the country: in short, it was a hectic period, and is widely accepted as (more or less) a decline of the Greek civilization as a whole. The Iliad is set in this particular time (many evidence in the story points this out), but there are also a lot of things that point to the ages
after the Dark Ages (Athens/Sparta/city states) and even some things that point to the Mycenaean period. While we cannot ever know for sure, it is widely accepted that Homer's Iliad has been changed through the course of years, which at least is a plausible reason for the many facts deriving from different periods in Greek civilized history.
It is therefore also not unbelievable that the Romans made their changes in the epic tale that we know now. The Romans, after all, desperately wanted their culture to be the best of them all, in all possible aspects. Culture, music, literature, knowledge, military force. You name it, and they wanted to be the best in it. Needless to say that the Aeneas was a literary work that was made to glorify Roman civilization.
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Taken from my Classical History [Greek & Roman] reader:
"[...] the Minoans had developed a pictographic writing system to keep records of their palace economies, which was in use from about 1900 B.C. THe pictographs were mostly incised on small stones used as seals (when pressed on wax or clay they leave an impression of the symbols) and were probably used as labels or marks of ownership. This picture writing, which could convey only minimal information, was replaced by a syllabic writing system incised on small clay tablets, used from about 1800 B.C. [...]
In the destruction level at Knossos, Arthur Evans [archaeologist] found a huge number (around three thousand) of clay tablets insicribed with a more elaborate version of the linear script. Evans named the earlier script "Linear A" and this later one "Linear B". He asssumed without question that the language of both was Cretan. The discovery in 1939 of many hundreds of the Linear B tablets at the palace complex of Pylos on the southwestern Greek mainland seemed to strengthen his theory that mainland Greece was controlled by the Minoans. [...]
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[ 05-17-2004, 04:14 PM: Message edited by: Link ]