Linear A and B

Linear A and the derivative Linear B are two very old languages.  (2500–1200 B.C.E).

Linear A is one of two currently un-deciphered ancient writing systems and is believed to have been used in palaces and religious settings while Linear B had a more common usage and seems to have been used as a language of trade. Deciphered examples appear to be lists of items for barter, numbers and even fractions.

Inscriptions in Linear A have been found carved on offering tables found in the many peak sanctuaries on the mountains of Crete and there has been an acceptance of a clear relationship between Linear A and Sanskrit, the ancient language of India. There is also a connection to Hittite and Armenian.

This relationship allows us to place the Minoan language among the so-called Indo-European languages, a vast family that includes Modern Greek and the Latin of Ancient Rome. The Minoan and Greek languages are considered to be different branches of Indo-European. The Minoans probably moved from Anatolia to the island of Crete about 10,000 years ago. There were similar population movements to Greece. The relative isolation of the population which settled in Crete resulted in the development of its own language, Minoan, which is considered different to Mycenaean.

In the Minoan language (Linear A), there are no purely Greek words, as is the case in Mycenaean Linear B; it contains only words also found in Greek, Sanskrit and Latin, i.e. sharing the same Indo-European origin."

I include this here as Linear A and B have been found mostly in Crete, Linear A has been unearthed chiefly on Crete, but also at other sites in Greece, as well as Turkey and Israel (specifically Tel Haror and Tel Lachish).

Tel Haror has been identified as the biblical city of Gerar at the site of Tell Abu Hureira (Tel Haror). Of the cities in ancient Judah, Tel Lachish was second in importance only to Jerusalem.

Let’s suppose for a minute that such old languages were all a derivative of an even earlier language.

The Tower of Babel (where the bible says all mankind was “confused” with different languages) has been associated with known structures according to some modern scholars, notably the Etemenanki, (Sumerian "temple of the foundation of heaven and earth") a ziggurat dedicated to the Mesopotamian god Marduk (Anunnaki) by Nabopolassar, king of Babylonia (c. 610 BCE)

NOTE: Ziggurats in ancient Mesopotamia were a rectangular stepped tower, sometimes surmounted by a temple. Ziggurats are first attested in the late 3rd millennium BC and probably inspired the biblical story of the Tower of Babel (Gen. 11:1–9).)

The Jewish Encyclopedia says the haggadic assumption that there are seventy nations and languages in the world is based upon the ethnological table given in Genesis 10., where seventy grandsons of Noah are enumerated, each of whom became the ancestor of a nation. The earlier Christian writers also took this table as determining the number of existing nations and languages.

NOTE: Haggadic midrash is an ancient Hebraic method of uncovering a depth of meaning from the Hebrew Scriptures, Every parable uses haggadic midrash to draw from the Old Testament in order to retell the story in a creative and artistic way.

Perhaps that is how one of the the Ziggurats became the Tower of Babel? A retelling of a supposed event in a manner which the culture could understand.