Expert: Maria - 6/14/2011

Question
Where did the original Minoans come from?

Answer
Hello,

still today nobody knows for sure where the original Minoans came from.

Some scholars say that the Ancient Minoans likely came from Asia Minor, the ancient name for the peninsula in the extreme west of Asia that is now called Anatolia and forms the greater part of Turkey.

Maybe in 6000 BC the ancient Minoans settled in the island of Crete where they seem to have founded Cnossus that was later the centre of Minoan civilization flourished from about 3000 BC to  about 1500 BC, when Mycenaean Greek culture became dominant in Crete, though it was already dominant in mainland  Greece from about 2700 BC.

We know of the Ancient Minoans only through their ruins, since they spoke a language we don't understand and they wrote in a script ( the so-called linear A) which we can't read, as there is no consensus on how to transliterate the Linear A symbols.


The oldest historic document where we read a description of Crete and its inhabitants  is Homer’s  Odyssey written in the 9th-8th century BC, long after the forming of the Minoan Culture.

In the Odyssey, book  19, lines 172 – 177, Homer says in fact:
”There is a land called Crete, in the midst of the wine-dark sea, a fair, rich land, begirt with water, and therein are many men, past counting, and ninety cities. They have not all the same speech, but their tongues are mixed. There dwell Achaeans, there great-hearted native Cretans there Cydonians, and Dorians of waving plumes, and goodly Pelasgians. Among their cities is the great city Cnossus, where Minos reigned...”

To conclude, the native Cretans that Homer calls “Eteocretans”( (Ἐτεόκρητες) meaning "True Cretans" were the descendants of the original Minoans who reached the island of Crete in about 6000 BC coming from western Asia, from Anatolia perhaps, or maybe  from ancient Syria or Palestine.
Finally, I have to point out that the Minoans are not an Indo-European people like the Mycenaeans and then the  Greeks.

Best regards,
Maria