The Phaistos Disk is the missing link connecting Mesopotamian cuneiform Akkadian with its Mediterranean alphabetic forms. As such it is a hybrid phonetic and alphabetic text dating to about 1800 BCE. It is a philosophical/religious debate about the cause of a recent drought, the first written debate in history. The key to its translation was its…[Read more]

Accurate knowledge of ancient Pagan culture has been lost because it was superseded by the Lordified, Revealed, Dualist (LRD) religious paradigm of the modern and classical eras. This lack of cultural understanding has corrupted archeological interpretation and prevented until recently the translation of the earliest alphabetic texts around the…[Read more]

The early claim that these two cippi are bilingual in Greek and Phoenician is shown to be false. Therefore, these texts cannot be used as the basis to understand the non-attested language of Phoenician. This historical fraud originated with Jacques Barthélemy (1716-1795). Phoenician is a letter style of Alphabetic Akkadian and not a language.…[Read more]

These seven alphabetic gravestone texts and one-coin texts from Sidon date to the Hellenistic era based upon their religious themes and their Greek Island letter styles. In contrast, one earlier coin style from Sidon from the Persian period has the Phoenician letter style. Their underlying language is Akkadian which was the empire language of…[Read more]

This paper provides evidence that Alphabetic Akkadian was being used in the Greek sphere of influence as an ancient authority temple language (like Latin in near modern Europe) prior to the mid-400’s BCE when the nationalistic fervor surrounding their war with the Persian empire replace it with Greek. Its Greek use is also evidenced by the 499 B…[Read more]

As revealed by later Greek records, the Naxos revolt was a socio-economic conflict between rural interests and commercial trading interests which led to the much larger Greek/Persian wars. While the socio-economic component is true, these three archaeological texts also show that the revolt was triggered by a drought and sustained by religious…[Read more]

The text on this large stone stele is a defense of Phoenician temple activity. Consequently, it was likely placed outside the main temple in the Phoenician trading port of Nora on the southern coast of Sardinia. Its theme is also Phoenician in that it is promoting emotion magic to overcome a drought. This drought is most likely the drought of 730…[Read more]

Three texts inscribed on gold foil were found in a holy relic repository located in a side room to a Pagan temple near Pygi, Italy. Their language is Alphabetic Akkadian yet their text styles are Phoenician and Etruscan. They are a philosophical debate about the cause and cure for a recent drought. The Phoenician text argues that emotion magic…[Read more]

Three previously untranslated Philistine (Sea Peoples) texts are translated in the empire language of Alphabetic Akkadian/Aramaic. Their script style is in the Minoan lineage which began with the Phaistos Disk and continued on with Linear A. Unlike those texts these texts are now fully alphabetic meaning their inner word signs are consonants…[Read more]

Two early and still readable linear texts were found carved on the walls of turquoise mine L at Serabit el-Khadim in the Sinai of Egypt by William Petrie in 1906. They were never properly translated. These texts were inscribed within bas-relief steles indicating they were officially sanctioned texts. These texts reference a dimmed sun which would…[Read more]

Translations of three graffiti type texts dating from the last years of ancient turquoise mine at Serabit el-Khadim in the Sinai blame jealousy for an ongoing drought. This drought is continuing due to the lack of magic crafters needed to overcome that negative emotional magic. These texts are in alphabetic Akkadian using a script which derives…[Read more]

The inscriptions at Wadi el-Hol just north of Memphis, Egypt are a late variant of Minoan Linear A showing its progression towards alphabetic writing with its treatment of phoneme signs more as wildcard signs able to be followed by any vowel sound. The Minoans were in Egypt during the early 18th dynasty as revealed by Minoan artwork discovered at…[Read more]

These are the first Minoan Linear-A translations ever made. Linear-A was solvable because its texts fit between the previously translated and highly pictographic Phaistos Disk (Olmsted May 2020) and the previously translated first alphabetic texts from the Sinai (Serabit el-Khadim) (Olmsted not yet published). The underlaying language of all these…[Read more]

The Phaistos Disk is a hybrid phonic and alphabetic text written in the empire language of Akkadian dating to about 1800 BCE. It is a philosophical debate about the cause of a recent drought and it represents the first use of alphabetic letters. It has many letter sign similarities with the pure Alphabetic Akkadian texts found at Serabit el Khadim…[Read more]

Review of: I. von Bredow 2017, Kontaktzone Vorderer Orient und Ägypten. Orte, Situationen und Bedingungen für primäre griechisch-orientalische Kontakte vom 10. bis zum 6. Jahrhundert v. Chr.”, Stuttgart

This is the first page only. Full article is available at https://doi.org/10.3764/aja.124.4.0523 (JSTOR subscription required) or https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/310940 (open access).

Abstract:
A wide variety of edits can be identified in the Linear B administrative documents from Mycenaean Greece. The writers of these documents…[Read more]

Whilst gold is the metal that is most commonly associated with Mycenae -mostly because of Homer’s reference to that city, but also because of the fabulous death masks that were uncovered by Schliemann in the shaft graves of Grave circle A, relatively little is known about the role and appreciation of silver in the Mycenaean world. Silver artefacts…[Read more]

Review of the 6th edition of the Linear B tablets from Knossos in transcription.
This is the accepted manuscript; the published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1017/eaa.2020.32.

This chapter examines the ways in which the Linear B ‘extra’ signs – syllabograms which can in certain circumstances replace the ‘core’ signs of the Linear B syllabary – are often used as evidence for the process by which this writing system was created from its parent writing system, Linear A, and thus, by extension, for reconstructing aspects of…[Read more]

The International Style is a theoretical model used to describe various objects from the Eastern Mediterranean Late Bronze Age that exhibit hybrid diagnostic features (iconography, media, form). Resulting in the inability for archaeologists over the past 150 years to identify cultural source. This paper is a reprint of the chapter on colour…[Read more]