Origins of the Ancient Minoans | DNA

[Music] um [Music] hey [Music] hey ladies and gentlemen welcome to the study of antiquity and the middle ages as always i'm your host nick barksdale but today we have a very special episode with a very special guest when i announced that i wanted to do a study on minoan origins dna i got an email that shocked me and i was super excited because a doctor had messaged me said he knew i wanted to do an episode on it but he wanted to make sure we did it correctly and i was thrilled there's a lot of misinformation surrounding these results and they can easily get misconstrued and so i told him since he opened the door he contacted me i had to have him on my show who better to do it than an expert themselves and so ladies and gentlemen i present to you dr peter rivez dr rivez thank you so much for coming on the show today good morning everyone good morning and dr avez for our audience today who may not be familiar with your work would you tell us a little bit about yourself i was born in communist hungary in 1965 and came to the united states with my parents when i was 15. i lived in kentucky attended tulane for my bachelors and got a phd from brown university in 1991. i'm currently a professor of computer science at the university of nebraska lincoln my specialties are data science bioinformatics and computational linguistics since i was a fulbright scholar at the university of athens in 2008 i used my expertise to study minoan genetics and writing when you hear the term minoan civilization based on your expertise your research and your imagination what comes to your mind when you hear those two words first the palaces of nazis and festus and the town of okrakiri with beautiful frescoes and i think many other people are attracted to this first as a computational linguist i'm also very interested in the linear a script that the ones used now before we talk about the minoan origins let's talk history what are some of the traditional views as to where the minoans came from the traditional view was that the minoans came from the near east according to a legend he minus was the son of europa a phoenician princess in the last few decades new theories were developed about minoan origins i just mentioned a few scholars and their proposals martin bernard egypt [Music] old european civilization graham campbell fulani from libya hubert lamar iran just to name a few as you can see these earlier theories range all over the compass and now when it comes to these traditional viewpoints what are your thoughts on them do you consider certain ones to be more accurate than others all of them have one common problem they didn't distinguish between the early and middle minors according to arthur evans the early minoans lived from 3000 to 2200 bc and the middlemen ones from 2200 to 1500 bc my own research came to the conclusion that these early and middle menorahs were two different groups of people and i based my research on the following ancient dna art motifs vowel harmony analysis script similarity etymology and decipherment of minoan inscriptions now what everyone's been waiting for let's talk ancient dna what has ancient dna told us about the ancient minoans and where they've came from that was a study in 2013 that considered mitochondrial dna which is inherited in the maternal line a second study which was published in nature magazine in 2017 provided more complete ancient dna and used the dna admixture analysis study of minoan origins the admixture analysis that the minerals came from the near east however this study had some problems what are some of the problems with the dna admixture analysis there are some problems with the dna admixture analysis in the nature paper i prepared a little slide which i would like to share with you so here is the main table from lazaridis at all called genetic origins of the minoans and mycenaeans nature paper from 2017. in the supplementary table they give some details about the admixture analysis that they used for minoans from the velocity plateau that is from the haralambus cave as you can see there are three references these are called ultimate sources in the nature paper and these included a paleolithic same sample from siberia an example of the mota group from africa a 15 000 years old siberian [Music] example from afontovagora and an eastern european hunter-gatherer abbreviated e-h-g now when we go through all the genes found in the minoans then it can be tested whether those genes are closest to which of the three references and then in the right hand side we can see that the proportions are such that the highest proportion is always from the third group which is the anatolian neolithic group okay which is another one it is ranging from 80 percent all the way to 96.7 percent now the conclusion that the paper made is that therefore the minoans came from anatolia the problem that i see with this analysis is that the ultimate sources of the paper did not include any samples from the old european neolithic and its bronze age successors the ultimate source is not necessarily the place where the minoans came from in the bronze age but this is this is a criticism on the paper which had some limitations and so how can this problem be avoided how did your analysis avoid this problem i have taken a look at all the mitochondrial dna from the mitochondria dna database and these are the haplogroups that were found from the neolithic and the early bronze age the yellow ones in anatolia are haplogroups a very ancient origin from that region the green ones are also from anatolia and the fertile crescent but they have moved to central europe mostly the danube basin why the blue ones are those which have a mesolithic origin in europe the shaded gray part is a refinement of the haplogroup classification and these indicate extra mutations that took place during the neolithic and the early bronze age while they still lived in europe these mutations indicate extra levels of the haplogroups for example uaf u5 a1 f the f is a mutation that doesn't occur earlier or outside of this region and similarly h5 a1g the a1g indicates mutations that doesn't occur earlier now the interesting thing is that the blue ones include the very important group of u5 which stems from the mesolithic and this u5 were found to be highest in proportion in the sami in finland among the morgans the maori and in estonia these are all indicated in blue and these are all finna ulgra language speaking areas so this gives rise to the idea that the phenomena group was were there in the mesolithic and grover kronz had a theory which exactly said that in 1988 interestingly long before archaeogenetic data became available so this was very forsightful for him to say that protofinal greek is a mesolithic language that is from the carpathian basin brother speaking the danubasim now to this we added uh another hypothesis that in this region where the fertile crescent origin genes come from bringing in the early neolithic culture and agriculture they mixed together and they acquired also the finnou greek language protofine nugrec language and from this region later they went north east and south as you can see all the way to estonia in the north and then finland and down to crete haplogroups that are shown here on this map can be all found in the haralamus cave in middle minoan times yes but the things here in the circled region they are from an earlier period than the haralumbus gave samples from crete and what does your analysis of the ancient dna actually tell us about the minoan origins it tells us that the minoans at least the middle minoans came from the dany basin at the beginning of the bronze age in the circled region that i showed you the mutations appear earlier than the age of the minoan samples so this is the only logical conclusion and now i want to talk about art motifs when it comes to minoan art what motifs are the most interesting for you i like among the all the automotives the water motif and the weld motif and these can be explained best by looking at some pictures which i also would like to share with you here's the first motif i would like to share with you and this is the water motif it has been inspired by creeks like this the ball is from iran from 4000 bc it can be found also in other cultures including in bhutmir a neolithic culture in the corridor culture in early minoan creed from gnosis and even in present-day hungary in page this motif was simplified and i show here a variation that the dots within a triangle were simplified to just a simple dot this appears in the inaudible culture bronze age culture from hungary in the nozzles this uh ladies motif has the dress water motif and even in conti art conte is a phenomenal group of people today living in siberia and it's very interesting to see the blue color another motif that i would like to share with you has an interesting story many of you know the sami people who live in northern finland they are also a finno-ugric language group people and only a few tens of thousands of people are left when i was visiting the university of helsinki in the fall of 2019 i had an opportunity to encounter sami art and then something really surprising happened before that as part of my work on art motifs of the minoans i have identified another automotive called the well motif let me share another slide about that the well motif is shown here from the node reef culture from the minoan culture and the swami culture in all of these the the water motif developed further by going around a rectangle and in the middle there is also a diagonal staircase-like structure in both the negative and the minoan culture and you can see in the sami knife the same thing happens you can see even the little dots here all around the carved knife handle when i saw this i was so shocked i didn't expect this this was an accidental discovery but nicely fits into the theory that there was an ancient group of people who spread from the danube basin both north all the way to the north of finland where the sami lived today down to the island of crete imminent times these motifs are so special and so related that this couldn't be accidental and we know also that this is a val motif because we have the water motif built into this and in all three examples we have animals drinking from the valve or being around there are many other motifs that i considered if people are interested in this subject they can check out one of my youtube videos specialized on automotives one of the things that i would like to call attention to is that this supports the earlier theory that we developed based on genetics namely a difference between the early minoans who have an early version of the water motif and the middle minoans who also share the well motif the val motif is not present in neolithic anatolia or the fertile crescent and though you've already touched on it for our viewers who may not have caught it earlier when it comes to your experience with these art motifs in your opinion what does it tell you about the origins of the minoans the automotive analysis beautifully supports the genetic analysis the genetic analysis concluded that the early minoans and the middle minoans are two separate people in the art motifs we have seen that the oldest version of the water motif comes from the near east the fertile crescent and anatolia however it has developed further and only the middle minoans share the well motif this development of the well motif occurred sometime in the danube basin and was carried as we have seen all the way north to the sami as well as all the way south to crete in the middle minoan period and now we're approaching an interesting subject and that is script and vowel harmony and for those of you that wonder how does this connect to what we're talking about don't worry because dr revez is going to walk us through it and now let's talk about the linear a script firstly what is it the linearity script appears on the island of crete around 1700 bc already fully formed it had to come from somewhere it cannot come from mesopotamia where kunai form was used or from egypt where egyptian hieroglyphs were used the logical place of origin is the old european culture which had a writing and in fact according to some archaeologists it it had the oldest writing moreover some of the signs are very linear in form just like we see in the linear a script which is called linear because a lot of lines are used to compose the various signs the linearity script preceded the linear b script which was solved in 1952 by michael ventris as an archaic form of greek but this linear b was only used in a later time which is which is called the late mean one period and so now i have to ask when it comes to linear a script and translating it why is it so hard to decipher decipherment is easier if we know the type of language in the script famously champuyon decipherment of egyptian hieroglyphs was held by his guests that ancient egyptian was related to the coptic language in order to guess the language of linear a we have to know where the minors came from and so that leads me to ask now what is your approach to deciphering the linear a script of course i use genetics to identify the origin of the minerals in addition i also used a vowel harmony testing algorithm to identify the type of language in which the minerals brought and for our audience today who may not know would you define vowel harmony i again would like to share some slides on this subject there are two classes of vowels the front vowels and these are the e e e and the back walls the front back vowel harmony in words mean that in the root words we only use front walls or back walls this happens for the words describing cloud and lag in these sample languages finnish hungarian and turkish the question is whether the script of linear a and the other minoan scripts the fastest disc and cretan hieroglyphs also have vowel harmony vowel harmony testing is useful to identify the possible language family of the minoan language because this characteristic or feature runs in language families some of the language families which share this feature are phenomenal languages korean mongolian nilo saharan gusy turkic and so on as you can see on this map so we have taken the fastest disk because this is the longest inscription from minoan period and this indicates very nicely in blocks the structure of the sentences each block may be a word or maybe a short phrase when we analyze this script which was described by arthur evans also and numbered from the center to the outside indicating a center to the outside reading then we can look for those words which are repeated frequently these are sequences of signs and probably they are root words i have indicated here in the middle some of the possible roots because these are occurring at least twice before that could be a prefix and after that a suffix and this could be additions for the sake of grammar in these languages which has have vowel harmony often you have many suffix and prefix this here are a few more examples of the same analysis and now comes an interesting fact when i looked at how the root words are composed into signs and these signs can be assumed to be having some phonetic value which is a composite of a consonant involved and this is similar to other bronze age scripts including the linear b that i mentioned and also sumerian cuneiforms and cypriot syllabary which we already know so in the bronze age syllable syllables were denoted by the signs and we can assume that most of them are consonant and a single vowel occasionally a consonant a single vowel and a consonant could also occur or evolve in itself but in either way we have only one vowel and that's important so when we are applying this algorithm which i don't need to go into all the details i just say that this algorithm is designed to reveal the internal structure of the script by creating a visualization called a syllable adjacency graph and the intuition here is that each node will be one of the signs and an edge occurs between two signs if and only if those two signs occur simultaneously within a root word when we do the structural analysis then we see that there are two main components a blue and a red one and a few pairs that seem to be isolates this structure indicates a very strong tendency to separate the signs into two groups and probably those which are now in white color they could join if we had more example words either the blue or the red component of this graph okay so the structure shown here is very typical of those languages which have vowel harmony where one of the groups let's say the blue maybe the back vowel syllables and the red may be the front vowel syllables and this indicates the separation so this language the underlying language of the fastest disk has to have vowel harmony i made similar analysis for linear a and it also tends to have evolved harmony now this is very interesting result and in some sense we have done a cross language family analysis so all languages are considered in this study all over the world but we now have to narrow further searches to language families where vowel harmony of the root words at least is a feature and as we discuss vowel harmony what you've learned from it and what you've seen what conclusions can be drawn based on your findings so the vowel harmony testing algorithm showed us that we have to search for language which has wall harmony in the area of the mediterranean and nearby regions there were very few language families which used while harmony for example ball hormone is not a feature of indo-european languages and it's not a feature of afro-asiatic languages therefore these two language families which were often tried as the basis of the minimum scripts have to be eliminated from consideration we have seen also the turkic language family and of course turkey was not there in the neolithic and early bronze age it is a later development in the mediterranean and also would need to be excluded in the study the finlandic language family which shares this feature actually and is now revealed to have a danube base in origin that is really a serious uh player in this consideration and it would agree again very beautifully with the genetic study and the art motif study there are other languages which are very interesting and ancient in the area some of the caucasian languages like georgian or proto-georgian which was also tried for the fastest disc but proto george georgian the corvallian group does not have vowel harmony either sumerian has only limited wall harmony and basque language which forms its own language group very interesting language also has been tried but doesn't have all harmony so on my opinion it also has to be eliminated from further consideration this is the implication of all of these results so far and now we approach a subject called script similarity when you talk about script similarity what do you mean by script similarity we mean that the signs in two alphabets or syllabaries tend to be similar in particular they can be matched up and can see be seen to be cognate or derived from the same ancestry a good example of this which even the ancient greeks themselves knew is the phoenician alphabet which was adapted in the classical greek period and we know that the greek alphabet derives from that and many of the other alphabets in the world the latin and so on now the interesting thing is that i have worked on script similarity analysis based on computer science techniques and visual similarity allowed me to bring together into one group a set of scripts called the kraton script family in one of your papers you talk about the cretan script family would you explain what that is and what it means creaton script family is a set of scripts that includes linear a linear b the cretan hieroglyphic script also the tiffinax script which is all early writing of the bear bears in north africa and it includes other scripts such as the carrion alphabet and the old hungarian alphabet do similar signs have similar phonetic values that's a very interesting question which is hard to answer sometimes the similarity visual similarity is accompanied by phonetic similarities the phoenician alphabet and the ancient greek alphabet are both similar visually and in pronunciation phonetic however this is not always the case if the writing has very small pictures as the signs and these pictures have a very clear meaning for those people who write them then such a script pictographic script could be adopted by another language group from an earlier language group and the pronunciation would change because both groups pronounce the pictures differently and the beginning letter or the beginning syllable will be different in the two groups i believe this happened with the adoption of linear a signs into linear b the phonetic values changed in many other cases although not in all cases because in the greek language the pronunciation of those words that were depicted in the pictures were different from the pronunciation in the minoan language and so with that being explained can you give us an example of signs like this whose phonetic value didn't change and remained the same yes there are several signs that i believe kinetic value remain and here is a sign for a fig tree this has a syllabic value of knee because knee is the beginning syllable for figs in ancient greek borrowed from the minoan language so this probably was native plant in the asian area and if people came from the north they could just adapt it and without any change was the name of the fig and the sign and so how does script similarity help in deciphering linear script a script similarity um can allow us a decipherment because if we know the phonetic values of one script and we can match its signs with linear a signs then we can have a possibility to reconstruct the linear aphonetic values as something similar to the other alphabet now as i have said this has been tried by linear b which of course visual is very close but comes from a different language group and so it doesn't seem to work for this reason another script which i tried is the carrion alphabet the carrion alphabet is attested from around 800 bc to around 100 bc and it's found in many places in western turkey present-day turkey but also in egypt and other places where the koreans lived they were also supposedly according to herodotus and other writers living in other places in the asian in the islands and maybe even on the island of crete so studying the carrion alphabet is a very important help in deciphering the script now for many years the carrion alphabet's phonetic values were also not known they were solved only in the past 15 years visually often they look similar to greek letters but the phonetic values are very different they come from an earlier tradition and i think the gap between the disappearance of linear a and kharian's alphabets alphabet's appearance a tested appearance is small enough that we can presume a continuity otherwise it would be a complete mystery where the korean alphabet came from and why it has the values it has now let me share with you a table which will compare the linear a signs with the korean alphabet letters in a journal paper from 2017 i have identified certain features by which i compare the various signs these features are simple things such as feature number one the symbol contains some curved line number two it enclosed is some region number three it has some slanted straight line number four it contains parallel lines and so on anybody who's interested can look up this on my web page using these features it's possible to analyze any set of linear signs in table 1 shown here we analyze a set of linear a sunnis this is in each column the black indicates the absence and the red indicates the presence of a certain feature so for this sign in the left this indicates that there is no curved line the second row is red it indicates it has some enclosed space and the third one indicates it has some slanted line the fourth one indicates it has no parallel lines and so on so as you can see each of the sign i analyze in terms of the certain features the same i apply to the korean alphabet letters as shown here the accordion alphabet shown on the top also has or doesn't have these certain features by the way it's possible to extend these features further to a larger set but this 13 seem to be very basic concepts that occur in topology and they are always coming up in other types of analysis of symbols and pictures so these are natural to choose now once we have a feature description a feature vector then it's possible to compare in a matrix form to scripts this table here is a comparison of linear a signs shown in the rows with the korean alphabet letters shown in the columns furthermore the order is arranged so that the highest values are always along the main diagonal the highest value is of course 13 in our analysis and this seems to be achieved in most cases in a few cases we have values of 12. now this means a nice matching between korean alphabet letters and linear a symbols and we can presume this to be not an accident if the two were completely unrelated then we would have a more irregular matrix best 13 would not appear always between one pair but would appear more randomly all over now we go to the next step which is how do we use this we have an expectation that the linear a signs stand for syllables linear b was also solved as a syllabary and we also can assume a natural development of scripts from the syllabic stage of writing to the alphabetic stage of writing where a consonant vowel pair of syllable was simplified over time to be a single consonant and so when we have let's see we have a consonant in the [Music] carrion alphabet for example we have this g a ge sound we can assume that this sign here which is very close to that will also start with the same consonant and will contain some vowel as well similarly if you have an n here this sine is an n and this is similar to this sign here this may start with an n as well okay and this could be me or no or there or new okay so this is how the script similarity can be used in an attempt to reconstruct the linear a phonetic values and so let's talk etymology how does etymology contribute to the decipherment of linear a etymology is very important because 4 000 years ago when most of the writing was written down there were no modern languages we had some ancient archaic or proto-form languages only and etymological dictionaries are very good in telling us which words could happen there and in what form in particular for phenol greek languages there were many proto-forms reconstructed by linguists and for in the european languages similarly there were very good reconstructions of proto-indo-european words now when we would like to understand how picture expressed in linear a could have been pronounced its meaning of the picture be an object like a bird or an action like walking we have to look at the protoforms and this can help us to guess what were the syllables which start in these proto-words and these syllables can be assumed to be the value phonetic value of the linear signs now we do it very carefully so as i said you have the n beginning already established using the carrion alphabet and then you are just looking for the vowel therefore you are not looking for all over the words over all possible proto words but only those proto words which start with n and then you can find a few which could possibly play a consideration this i call the controlled acrophonic principle the controlled acrophonic principle is very narrow and usually only a few words can be considered instead of all the possible words that come to mind when we see an object so the acrophonic principle in itself has led to many misleading and wrong translations but the controlled acrophonic principle that i use is so careful i think that i have i believe good translations of some of the linear a inscriptions so here is a table i made this is a syllabary grid where the rows show the consonants and the columns show the vowels and the sign that we considered is shown here this was matched with the korean leather for n its softened or palletized version is enya there happens to be a phenomenic in particular hungarian word which starts with this but this is a phenomenic origin so this is near i would say this is the end [Music] e or pronounced e as a matter of fact okay and so uh everywhere in this table we can see a reconstruction of the values another thing that i can see is let's look at this symbol here this linear a symbol looks like a bird turning its neck backward in this case this could be found to be similar to the cypriot syllabary sign for l e and interestingly enough there's a name for gurus in finnish another phenolic language which is lin 2 and lintu is very close to the proto-finno-ugric reconstructed work for booze so we can be pretty sure about l e syllabic value for this linear a sign and similarly everywhere else we do the reconstruction now our reconstructions are not going to be perfect however if we achieve a 90 or close to 90 percent accuracy that it already allows some translations of perhaps the easier inscriptions and so as we approach translations can you give us an example of one of your linear a translations it is a pleasure to give you some examples of course i have 28 translations published in a journal paper in 2017 and i have in addition published in other journal articles translations of some kraton hieroglyphic inscriptions and also a translation of the fastest disk i'm going to give you an example which is my favorite and this is an inscription that is found on a golden ring near nasus so i would like to share with you just one example of linearity translations that i have been working on this example is a beautiful gold ring that comes from mavro steelio near nasus and it is inscribed with the linear a script around 1600 to 1500 bc now this is red from the outside to the center and i have put the standardized linear e signs in this row highlighted in blue below that i put the syllabic values that come from the table i've shown before as you can see the second sign has the value and e ner as we have discussed in the third row i will have the likely minoan phonetics just like in linear a some of the walls may drop out and this is a slight simplification from the earlier row in fact for example the n before k can be omitted in the writing it's implicitly there but it's kind of a glide sound it's not always indicated even in linear b so that's why we have another row here for the minoan phonetics as they can reconstruct now um i choose among finnographic languages a number of them but hungarian i often look up it's has similar words to the phonetics of the minoans as can be seen and as i said i look for words that have finno-ugric origin so in some words many of these can be also found in let's say the finnish language estonian maori modern and other fender languages fein which is fenne is meaning light such as uh sunlight okay and um shellac log it's gleaming okay which is appropriate for stars and uh lu can be an archaic form of la this appears in uh of some phenomenic languages as a meaning down or downward uh rank this means onto and then the serial is supposed to set out the s z is just hungarian version of s it's not [Music] pronounced differently and feke d is just means fake talon fake is another another uh ancient word which has cognates in uh fenugreek languages such as hunty and monsie these are today living in western siberia just across the world mountain so when i put all of this together this is what i find the root words are indicated in red the conjugations the suffixes are indicated in blue and the text which is emerging in an english translation is the following sun shine and stars gleam down onto us love without break so it's this is some kind of motto maybe for lovers i don't know how the gold ring may have been used it may have been a gift just like in today's age for a new couple okay i don't know but this is the text that is emerging here and you can see that the root words and the conjugations those are meaningful and they together give the meaning which is the translation it's very important when we do translations to achieve a consistency when we have a single inscription it's possible to translate it because we have a lot of freedom in how we assign the phonetic value to each sign and if we try hard for a short inscription we will succeed to have meaning what is interesting and it is an indication that we are on the right track is that we have we have 40 translations as of now which is consistent and all based on ancient words cognate with ancient words almost every word and some of the grammar is also very clearly the same the translation of course is continuing because there are 1500 uh 14 1500 linear a inscriptions on various objects some of them are clay tablets and carvings into stone and also we have about 400 kraton hieroglyphic scripts and so there's a lot of work to do but i i believe we have a fairly consistent translation [Music] and we have improved a little bit the syllabic grid i have talked about so there were some small improvements that we had to make uh to get better uh translation meaningful translations but we are in the right track that's what i tried to say and let everyone know who is listening today and dr revez given what you've done what you've researched what is the general acceptance or objections to your work one of the objections is stemming from the idea that the final ulgra homeland was near the ural mountains and the fenugreek people lived around that area until a few centuries after bc and actually now it turns out that the homeland of the finger people were near the danube delta in the danube basin and many of the groups migrated north from there and east if we place the protofinal greek homeland in the danube basin then we can imagine very easily that they could know how to sail ships and come from the black sea into the aegean sea so this would be a settling of this concern and of course i understand that for 120 years people look for a language in the mediterranean area very often people don't know geography and don't realize how easy it is to get from the black sea through the bosphorus strait into the agent it's actually easier and a shorter route than coming from the near east is that good yeah yeah i like that that's really good okay because this doesn't go into too much detail about hungarian history which is which is um debated yeah controversial a little bit so i can tell you just offline that there are groups which say that the hungarian scheme at the end of the 9th century into the present area where they live there's another group which says that the hungarians are natives to the area carpathian basin danube basin and these two groups are debating and there's also a third group which is now gaining somehow political power i don't know why but scanning political power which says that the hungarians are actually descendants of the hans and this is a little bit simplistic people have been uh confusing the horns who also lived in that area in the fourth century with the hungarians and the names are similar so i understand the confusion also the some archaeogenic uh studies indicate that the royal dynasty the so-called house of arpad the arpa dynasty who has established a very strong feudalistic kingdom is of han chronicles said that in the middle ages and now archaeogenetics supports it some nearest relative in the y chromosome branch seems to be found in mongolia the problem is that in mongolia nobody nobody ever imagined to be a fenugreek homeland that's out of question and the language is phenomenal you cannot overturn this thing although some people try and the simple solution in my mind is that the dynasties have nothing to do with the people the dynasty and the ruling class the nobles establish themselves after the conquest but some conquest occurred similar to i would say and you know his story very well william the conqueror yeah william the conqueror came to england established a very strong feudalistic kingdom before that there were many fighting uh smaller kings kingdoms okay and uh william the conqueror is really made england great okay in the sense of setting it in a passive great power okay and so in england you know he's respected and you know part of british history okay nobody thinks about him as somehow an outsider anymore okay and many of the knights he brought with him became the early nobility in england so something similar happened but the language didn't change the language was english and remained english germanic language in all classifications and many of the latin french words that came into the language [Music] just addition of words and not a basic change in the overall structure and i see this similar thing happening in hungarian language too so you can have some foreign words including some of han origin although we don't know the language too well some turkish origin it's attested we have turkish origin words a good few hundred of them definitely and and yet the language is still in the umbric so they had to be in that area and the u5 is the almost completely dominant u5 haplogroup is the dominant haplogroup in the mesolithic and it's always in high proportion in the phenomenal groups compared to their neighbors so that's the logical conclusion that it was the original uh homeland in the in the mesolithic and this language comes from that and uh the indo-european languages came uh later in the bronze age and the theory of marijuana is according to maria gimbotas there was an old european civilization which had a very high culture and this may be associated with the fenugreek language also this is all european culture is where the minoans descend from came from and it had writing some of the earliest writing as i mentioned the newcomers from anatolia and the fertile crescent who came to the danube basin according to my theory acquired the phenol greek language after mixing with the local population that's how you can imagine things to have happened of course this hypothesis is just a hypothesis but in many cases it occurred that the incomers acquired the local language this happened uh many times in history and uh an example of this in the interaction between the older hunter-gatherer groups and the new commer neolithic groups in the danube basin and so we are looking for a solution to the minimum language which comes from that region and that language family group thank you and it was my pleasure to talk with you okay yeah absolutely have a good day thank you goodbye and to my subscribers firstly thank you all for watching and for really enjoying this episode and secondly i want to encourage you all check out the links below in the video description it's going to take you to a variety of sources to where you can really dive in and enjoy the work that dr rives is doing to help me and you better understand the subjects that we all love dr braves thank you so much for coming on the show today my pleasure and ladies and gentlemen have an excellent night and thank you so much for watching [Music] [Music] um [Music] [Music] to [Music] now

Channel: Study of Antiquity and the Middle Ages

Views: 112,535

Keywords: Minoan Linear A, Cretan Hieroglyphs, Ancient, Ancient DNA, Ancient Origins, Minoan Civilization, Ancient Aegean, Ancient Europe, ancient history, ancient languages, Ancient Writing, minoan civilization, Minoan Origins, minoan art, cycladic, neolithic europe, europe history, europe first civilization, Indo European, mycenaean civilization, danube valley civilization, Bronze Age, Bronze Age Collapse, crete dna, Minoan DNA, cretan history, cretan hieroglyphs, Sea Peoples

Id: 8UJOaRDK5d4

Length: 76min 53sec (4613 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 03 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Oz_of_Three]

This sounds spectacularly interesting, however... is there a page where Dr. Ravesz lecture can be read? (as opposed to listened to?)
A transcript? That's the word.
Is there such?

[u/8roll]

1 hour and 20 min? This is perfect for my usual nights where I check the ruins with google earth :)

[u/Barksdale123]

In this video I host Dr. Peter Revesz on an absolutely fascinating subject and that is the origins of the ancient Minoans.

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The Minoan civilization flourished in the Middle Bronze Age on the island of Crete located in the eastern Mediterranean from c. 2000 BCE until c. 1500 BCE. With their unique art and architecture, and the spread of their ideas through contact with other cultures across the Aegean, the Minoans made a significant contribution to the development of Western European civilization as it is known today.

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In this episode we go back to a time before civilization. A time of mass migration.

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This episode sets out to explore the Minoan Origins from different viewpoints.

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Firstly, we explore traditional narratives and especially what they got wrong.

And then we approach Ancient DNA, Art motifs, Vowel harmony, Script similarity, Etymology and finally Translations.

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Has Dr. Revesz deciphered Linear A Script and how has his work been accepted?

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As we conclude Dr. Revesz believes his data analysis lead to the conclusion that we need to separate the Minoans into two groups: the Early Minoans and the Middle Minoans.(The Late Minoans could be a third group, but there is no archaeogenetic data about them.) Earlier studies have not separated these groups, which have different origins.

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The Early Minoans came from Anatolia, while the Middle Minoans came from the Danube Basin. (Sailing from the Danube Delta to Crete is quite possible via the Bosporus Strait.)