Who were Minoans?
The Minoans did not come from Palestine.
What happened was that they created the colonies that later on created the Palestinian nation. So the Palestinian cities were Minoan colonies. Minoans were Hellenes of course...
Phallanx
Unregistered User
(12/13/03 8:42 pm) Reply
Re: Who were Minoans?
About the Minoans...
They have nothing to do with the Achaeans, Dorians, Makedonians or any other Hellenic Indoeuropean tribe that settled Hellas. They came from middle east and they are relatives with the ancient Egyptians. Of course their highly developed culture offered much to the Hellenic tribes that came later in contact with them.
Re: Who were Minoans?
A) The anciant Hellenes throught their myths gave us the answers. Zeus himself, the Greatest God, the King of the heavens,the leader of the Gods was born to Crete,at ideon Andron.
B) Idomeneas the king of Crete asked the hand of Helen and later on when Paris kidnaped her,was among those who send help to the war against Troy.
C) The Cretans were accepted to the olympics as Hellenes.
D) The Minoans in all the ancient greek scrips are considered as Hellenes and actually among the most respectable and wise.
E) The 3 judges at the gates of Hades,who,because of their wisedom,decided the fate of the dead,were:
--1) Eakos (king of Aegina,an island outside of Athena )
--2) Minoas (king of the Minoans at Crete)
--3) Radamanthis (son of Zeus and Europe who lived in Crete and was a Minoan)
There are a lot more that could be said but i think that those are enough.
Phallanx
Unregistered User
(12/13/03 8:47 pm) Reply
Re: Who were Minoans?
Let us also check this about the Minoans....
This is a list with the known names of the Minoan kings.The symbol "-" represents word elements missing or undiscribed yet:
Satur I the Great
Saa--tepi
Saasi--
Sakavipi
Sa--nora
Saiapis and Satur II
Satetot
Apafatop and Satur III
Satur IV
Sakav and Saasi--
--tot
Ridon
--av
Iasiton
--nai--d
Na--napu--
Nodamate
All the above names clearly sound Egyptian, but then something happened...
---1450 BC THE MINOAN CIVILIZATION IS DISRUPTED AND THE PALACE IN KNOSSOS BURNED PROBABLY BY EXPLOSION OF THE VOLCANO OF THE NEAR ISLAND CALLED THIRA (SANTORINI)---
In a mysterious way after the first disaster,the names of the later kings begin to sound Hellenic!!!!
Kris
Tektamos
Asterios
Minos the Great
Deucalion
---13 century BC.Myceneans (Hellenic Achaeans) attack and conquer Minoans.Knossos palace is burned down again.---
Colonization of Crete by Myceneans.
__________________
Alexander the Great addressing the dead Hellenes of the battle of Chaeronia:
"Holy shadows of the dead,I`m not to blame for your cruel and bitter fate,but the accursed rivalry which brought sister nations and brother people,to fight one another.I do not feel happy for this victory of mine.On the contrary,I would be glad brothers if I had all of you standing here next to me,since we are united by the same language,the same blood and the same visions "
Phallanx
Unregistered User
(12/13/03 8:49 pm) Reply
Re: Who were Minoans?
Nefeli....
Idomeneas was a far later king of Crete. He was Mycenean not Minoan. The Minoans had dissapear at this time. Of course Cretans were accepted to the Olympic games because they were Achaeans and later Dorians. But Minoans didn`t exist in the time of Homer.
__________________
Alexander the Great addressing the dead Hellenes of the battle of Chaeronia:
"Holy shadows of the dead,I`m not to blame for your cruel and bitter fate,but the accursed rivalry which brought sister nations and brother people,to fight one another.I do not feel happy for this victory of mine.On the contrary,I would be glad brothers if I had all of you standing here next to me,since we are united by the same language,the same blood and the same visions"
Re: Who were Minoans?
I ve never heard before the names that you gave as names for the Cretan kings.
Where did you find those informations?
All the known kings of Crete as far as we know, had Hellenic names and the Cretans were Hellenes with hellenic traditions, language and religion.
And the kings that we know and the Minoan civilisation that we know to have existed, is exactly that one that evolved before the eruption of the volcano of Thira(Santorini).
So about when are you talking?
Phallanx
Unregistered User
(12/13/03 8:52 pm) Reply
Re: Who were Minoans?
You know these Hellenic names because most of the known Cretan kings exept Minos are known because of Homer. But these kings (after Deucalion), they were not Minoan.They were Mycenean. Like Atreas, Idomeneas and Leukos.
The early Minoan states exist untill 2700 BC!
I found this information in the historical guide I bought in the palace of Knossos.
__________________
Alexander the Great addressing the dead Hellenes of the battle of Chaeronia:
"Holy shadows of the dead,I`m not to blame for your cruel and bitter fate,but the accursed rivalry which brought sister nations and brother people,to fight one another.I do not feel happy for this victory of mine.On the contrary,I would be glad brothers if I had all of you standing here next to me,since we are united by the same language,the same blood and the same visions"
Phallanx
Unregistered User
(12/13/03 8:54 pm) Reply
Re: Who were Minoans?
And something else...
The Minoans didn`t speak or write Greek. Myceneans brought the language on the island. For writing they used Ãñáììéêç Á êáé Â. A known artifact proving their unique writing is the "Festos stone".
During the Hellenic Classical era, Crete retained an aura of mystery and legent to the Hellenic mind.
Later some people will conect Minoans with Atlantians (but as far as I`m conserned, this is bull...t).
__________________
Alexander the Great addressing the dead Hellenes of the battle of Chaeronia:
"Holy shadows of the dead,I`m not to blame for your cruel and bitter fate,but the accursed rivalry which brought sister nations and brother people,to fight one another.I do not feel happy for this victory of mine.On the contrary,I would be glad brothers if I had all of you standing here next to me,since we are united by the same language,the same blood and the same visions"
Re: Who were Minoans?
So after which time period do you claim the Greeks to have inhabited Crete?
Quote:Phallanx:
I consider Minoans and Greek islanders as pro-Hellenic civilizations.Because of them the later Hellenic tribes reached the highest cultural standards.
Historians say that the first Achaeans arrived in Crete at about 1300 BC and Dorians invaded the Achaians of Crete at about 1200 BC.
What you say has no point at all.
As i already said the periods we are talking about are before 1200BC. Idomeneas was the king of Crete at the peak of its civilisation at the period 1200-1400 BC. The Troyan war took place at about that period. And the Creatans were Hellenes for at least 400 years at that time, because they had already create their civilisation and that happened in a period of 400-500years. So the Minoan civilisation, as we know it, was hellenic since at least 1700-1900BC.
And before that there is no hint that there was a war or a destruction that changed the consistance of the population, so we can only accept that the Minoans were Greeks since...ever.
Lets not forget that the tidal wave that was the end of the Minoan power and civilisation took place at 1200 BC(please forgive me if that date is wrong,i am not sure about the exact date but it was about that time).The miceneans succeded to evolve after the fall of the Minoans so to say that they attacked when they were just one small city and the Minoans were the Kings of Hellas....is crazy.
Minoans were Greeks and nothing proves the opposite.
Phallanx
Unregistered User
(12/13/03 9:01 pm) Reply
Re: Who were Minoans?
This is the timetable of the Minoan civilization and the colonization of Crete:
2600-2000BC early Minoans states.
2000-1800BC Indermediate Minoan state
1800-1450 Minoan empire
Important dates:
1950BC first construction of Knossos palace
1725BC the first known king of Minoans Satur I the Great
1450BC Minoan civilization takes a fatal blow from the volcano.Actually they never recovered.First destruction of Knossos palace.
1300BC Myceneans destroy the remainings of Minoan element on Crete.Second destruction of Knossos.
1200BC the Dorians invade Crete with Altemenos in command.
310BC Crete falls to the Egyptians.
Re: Who were Minoans?
The story of European civilization really begins on the island of Crete. Around 1700 BC, a highly sophisticated culture grew up around palace centers on Crete: the Minoans. What they thought, what stories they told, how they narrated their history, are all lost to us. All we have left are their palaces, their incredibly developed visual culture, and their records. Mountains of records. For the Minoans produced a singular civilization in antiquity: one oriented around trade and bureaucracy with little or no evidence of a military state. They built perhaps the single most efficient bureaucracy in antiquity. This unique culture, of course, lasted only a few centuries, and European civilization shifts to Europe itself with the foundation of the military city-states on the mainland of Greece. These were a war-like people oriented around a war-chief; while they seemed to have borrowed elements of Minoan civilization, their's was a culture of battle and conquest. We call them the Myceneans after the best-preserved of their cities, and their greatest accomplishment, it would seem, was the destruction of a large commercial center across the Aegean Sea in Asia Minor: Troy. Shortly after this defining event, their civilizations fell into a dark ages, in which Greeks stopped writing and, it seems, abandoned their cities. It was an inauspicious start for the Europeans:[COLOR=Green]in Europe the experiement began with the brilliance of the Minoan commercial states translated into the brief, war-like city-states of the Myceneans, only to slip back into the tribal groups that had characterized European civilization for almost all of its history. In spite of this, the basic character of European civilization is laid down in this early experiment; even though they slip into obscurity, the Greeks will permanently remember the Myceneans as the defining moment in their history.
Lost to human memory for over three and a half millenia, the Minoans stand at the very beginning of European civilization. While Europeans had known about the pre-Homeric world through the poems of Homer, only the Greeks and Romans seem to have taken these poems seriously as history. That pre-Homeric world, however, was lost in the haze of generations of oral story-telling before it finally got fixed in the poems of Homer. However, in 1870, an amateur archaeologist, Heinrich Schliemann, determined to find the real Troy of the Trojan War, the war that is the center of the Homeric poems. After successfully locating and digging up Troy, he turned his sights to the Greek mainland and discovered two ancient cities, Myceanae and Tiryns, which together revealed a civilization that up until that point had only been known in the poems of Homer and Greek drama. His discoveries inspired a man named Arthur Evans to begin digging in Crete in order to discover what he thought would be an identical, Mycenean culture thriving on that island; instead, what he found was a people far more ancient than the Myceneans, and far more unique than any peoples in the ancient world: the Minoans.
They were a people of magnificent social organization, culture, art, and commerce. There is no evidence that they were a military people; they thrived instead, it seems, on their remarkable mercantile abilities. This lack of a military culture, however, may have spelled their final downfall. For the Minoans also exported their culture as well as goods, and a derivative culture grew up on the mainland of Greece, the Myceneans, who were a war-like people. Strangely enough, the direct inheritors of their traditions may have been the agents of their destruction.
But we know now that Greek civilization began at least a millenium before the Age of Athens and almost eight hundred years before Homer. It began off the mainland of Greece, in the Aegean Sea, in the palaces of the bureaucrat-kings of Minoa.
...This was easy, because ever since many centuries ago many nations were speaking the Cretan language (Hellenic) and were writing in Linear A', with minimal alterations, depending on the intellectual education of each nation. Most of them were under the influence of Cretan settlers, who with the passing of the millennia had created their own civilizations not any more dependant on the metropolis.
The Minoan civilization of that era is far from the Mycenaean and every other civilization to the extent that the technology of a bicycle is exceeded by the technology spaceships or the technology of nuclear weapons from the unknown to the western world Tesla superweapon technology.
«If we could view a Cretan palace of approximately 1500 B.C. with almost all its decorations, it would cause us surprise, if not astonishment», HOOD claims. (Here HOOD, a worthy excavationist, perhaps the only English that passed from the island at the last millennium with clearly scientific and not trading interests as other descendants of Elgin and Evans, refers according to the until now predominant view of events chronology, which does not anymore correspond to the reality about 'prehistoric' occurrences). At the Ugarit poems , the god of handicraft has his throne in Kaphtor(=Crete), Sinclair Hood notes.
«Here -says Nikos Kazantzakis at his Reference to Graeco - the soul of Greece performed its fatal mission: it brought the god at the human climax. The enormous, static Egyptian or assyrian statues became here, in Crete, small and charming. The body moved, the mouth smiled, the face and height of the god took the face and height of the human».
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