city of Cretan antiquity.
And the high Cretan civilization, the Minoan civilization that they immediately proceeded to overrun, had, among its other attractions, this magical
And this indigenous Cretan script, by the way, which is several centuries older than Linear B but looks a great deal like it, is what we now call Linear A.
They took this indigenous Cretan script, adapted it for use with their own language, and eventually carried it back with them to the mainland.
But what the Cretans did was unique.
So if you were a Cretan that morning, you would notice the sky getting dark.
And so what I think the Cretan Runner would have been able to do, what the Cretan resistance was able to do, was tap into this legacy
He had also turned up evidence of a somewhat older Cretan script, which he called, quite reasonably, Linear A. The end
which were the civil documents of an ancient Cretan culture, might contain something similar.
And it was while doing that research that I first heard about the Cretan Runner, who I originally thought was some kind of runner or some kind of marathoner or ultra
Because when I started to look back into this guy known as the Cretan Runner, George Psychoundakis, and questioned what he did, what he was doing
And what I began to realize is this idea of how the Cretan Runner was able to survive in the mountains began to make sense.
Because unlike anywhere else in the world, the Cretans resisted immediately.
So George is the guy who became known as the Cretan Runner, George Psychoundakis.
Now, everyone knew that the tablets were the municipal documents of this Bronze Age Cretan kingdom.
And that was one of the things, that was one of the impulses that had me circle back to this idea of the Cretan Runner.
It was for Minos, legend held, that the architect Daedalus had built the Cretan labyrinth, which housed at its center the fearsome Minotaur, half man, half bull.
her widowed mother, cigarette burning at her elbow, and poured over the strange Cretan inscriptions.
What if, Ventris wondered, some of the related words in Kober's triplets were actually related forms of Cretan place
So on the strength of this word, Ventris plugged sound values into other words on the tablets, and they too yielded important Cretan place names.
Because remember, in Homer's day, 500 years after the Cretan tablets were inscribed, the Homeric epics were written
Well, the B we know because it's the successor to Linear A, the indigenous Cretan script.
cuneiform, which was impressed with a wedge-shaped tool, these Cretan scripts were made with linear strokes.
But if you want to see them in the flesh, as it were, in the clay, many of the Cretan ones are at the Heraklion Museum.
But they were at one point moved to that island, probably by, well, potentially by Cretans or someone else.