Paths From Babel: Who were the Minoans?

Therefore is the name of it called Babel;

because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth:

and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.

Genesis 11:9

"Crete’s Minoan civilization has long been considered Europe’s first great Bronze Age society. The floruit of the Minoan civilization, which spread across Crete in the third millennium B.C.

Who were the Minoans? Despite their celebrated legacy, the Minoan civilization remains shrouded in mystery. We do not know what language was spoken on Crete, and the scripts of the early Minoan

civilization—Cretan Hieroglyphs and Linear A—have eluded translation attempts for over a century.

Sir Arthur Evans claimed that the ancestors of the Minoan civilization came from North Africa, but more recent scholars have suggested dozens of additional forefathers for the Minoan population. On May 14, 2013, Nature Communications published the study “A European population in Minoan Bronze Age Crete,” analyzing mitochondrial DNA from Minoan osseous tissue found in caves at the Cretan Lassithi plateau. It suggests that the Minoan civilization was comprised of local Europeans rather than outsiders. The Greek and American research team writes that “Our data are compatible with the hypothesis of an autochthonous development of the Minoan civilization by the descendants of the Neolithic settlers of the island” and that “shared haplotypes, principal component and pairwise distance analyses refute the Evans North African hypothesis.” BiblicalArchaeologyReview