A Decipherment of the Eteocretan Inscription from Psychro (Crete)

Abstract

This study presents a decipherment of the Eteocretan inscription from Psychro (Crete), which was discovered in 1958 and dated to about 300 BC. The inscription was attributed to an unknown Eteocretan language, while the attempts to read the text so far included languages like Hittite, Semitic, even Slavic, without remarkable results. The attempt of the herein decipherment is based on the following concepts evidenced in earlier publications: The inscriptions that are conventionally called Eteocretan convey more than one language. These languages could not have remained totally unaltered through the centuries. Eventually, they had to be written in the Greek alphabet, because of the predominant cultural context. Of course, the Greek alphabet could not precisely render the non-Greek Eteocretan languages, so the scribes improvised their own ways to approximate the sounds of their native language, and this is one more factor that makes it harder for modern researchers to determine the language of the Eteocretan inscriptions. This is the only Eteocretan inscription that was preserved practically intact, but as all attempts of interpreting were fruitless, some researchers have declared it a fake. It would be pointless to return to interpretations of the inscription as conveying languages stated in previous attempts, and since it has been shown in a previous publication that the inscription cannot be fake, the present interpretation follows the latest linguistic evidence about the Sumerian origins of the Aegean scripts and, especially, the confirmation of a Cretan Protolinear script’s existence.