The Dreros Stones, and an Ancient Language Lost to the Nazis

Unpicking our ancient past is a nigh-impossible challenge. Piecing together who we are and where we came from has been likened to sifting sand through a screen, trying to find the odd grain which might offer another clue.

For the truth is history is mostly lost. Almost everything of what we were simply doesn’t survive, gone forever beyond where we might recover it. This is why there is so much speculation about our journey as a species, this is why anything which can tell us anything is treasure.

We do not even know much of what we have lost. The gaps in our records are large enough to swallow entire civilizations, and even those we know exist almost all offer more questions than answers.

But perhaps most heartbreaking are the answers we had within our grasp, but which were lost to us. No matter what we do to preserve these treasures much is lost, and never more so than in times of war.

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So it was that we had a moment in time, less than a decade in truth, where we held the key to one of the strangest, and the oldest languages in Europe. We held in our hands two unassuming stones written in an unknown language, stones which vanished forever under the ministrations of the Nazis.

These were the Dreros Stones, and the language they might have helped us decipher was Linear A, one of the great mysteries of Bronze Age Europe.

The Rosetta Stone for Bronze Age Greece

To understand the importance of the Dreros Stones, there is much that needs to be understood about both Linear A, the people who spoke and wrote using it, and how ancient languages may finally be cracked.

Confusing, it is best to start with Linear B, another language from the same region which came later. Linear B was the language of the Mycenaean Greeks, a pictographic and syllabic language spoken by Agammemnon, Odysseus, Achilles and Helen.

It was a widespread language until something happened in the 12th century BC. The palaces of Bronze Age Greece were burned and the remnant population forgot how to read. It would be centuries before Greece taught themselves to write again, and it would be with an entirely new alphabet.

Linear B was thought lost until a brilliant English linguist named Michael Ventris had a realization, or rather an inspired guess: what if the language hadn’t changed, only the letters? What if Linear B wasn’t a lost language, but an early form of Greek?

This was the clue to unlocking the puzzle, and Linear B was finally translated in 1952. The later writings of Archaic Greek, the civilization that emerged from the Greek Dark Age around 750 BC, could be used as a “Rosetta Stone” providing a key for the earlier Linear B of Bronze Age Greece.

So much for Linear B. But in the Mediterranean of the Bronze Age there was an earlier language with some marked similarities which many considered very similar to Linear B. This language, was known as Linear A, was spoken by a culture even older: the Minoans.

Some claim the Minoans of Crete (named such by archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans: we have no idea what they called themselves) as the first true civilization of the Mediterranean. They built great palaces and cities, traded extensively across the Aegean, and endured for centuries until they were wiped out by the Bronze Age Greeks of the Mycenaean kingdoms.

Linear A shows us that the Minoans were not a silent culture. Much can be learned from surviving writings, but sadly none of it can be understood.

It was at first hoped that Linear A was close enough to Linear B to allow the translation of the latter to help understand Minoan texts. But this soon proved to be a dead end: Linear A may used the same pictographic system, but underneath it is an entirely different language.

What was needed was something similar to the method used for Linear B. Was there a descendant language, like Greek for the Mycenaeans, which could be used to understand Linear A for the Minoans?

And, both amazingly and frustratingly, it seems that there was. The Minoan culture may have died out, their language extinct, but out of the ashes rose a new language, called Eteocretan.

This language is also extinct, and survives in far fewer examples than archaic Greek. Only about half a dozen inscriptions survive, written in a Greek alphabet but clearly not Greek.

But chief among these finds are two carved stones with a text written both in Eteocretan and in Greek. We have the tools to be able to translate this dead language, and through this lies our hope for understanding the ancient language of the Minoans.

Or, at least, we had the tools. All of the finds were made at one site, in an ancient temple dedicated to Apollo in the Greek archaeological site of Dreros, near Neapolis in Crete. The two key finds including the Greek translations were made in the mid 1930s.

Less than five years later Europe was plunged into total war. Crete was captured and held by the Nazis, and the stones disappeared. 

Nazi archaeology was a reductive, if not entirely destructive, affair. The Nazis were in search of any evidence which “proved” that they were a superior race, or at least a race with an ancient history, and anything which did not support this was discarded, if not outright destroyed.

Of the two stones, only half of one is know today. The survivor has had its Eteocretan text broken off, leaving only a Greek inscription. Of the other there is no sign.

We have drawings of the two pieces, but this does not give us enough information to put us on the path to a successful translation of Linear A. But these are hand-drawn copies of the stones, and much detail could have been missed which may be invaluable.

Where did the stones go? Were they destroyed, or taken back inside the Reich for further study? And could they, if they are ever recovered, help us in understanding the Greeks who came before all the others, and in unlocking the language of Linear A and the secrets of the Minoans?

Header Image: The Dreros Stones could be the key to reading Linear A, the ancient language of the Minoans. Source: Émile Gilliéron / Public Domain.