From: Dennis Poulter
Message: 2478
Date: 2000-05-22
The Mediterranean Substratum
I put it to you that the Aegeo-Asianic-Mediterranean-Japhetic substratum is a fabrication and does not nor has ever existed.
It's function is to isolate the "god-like" (Humboldt's phrase) Greeks from any contamination from Semites or Africans.
When Mycenae and Knossos were discovered, and the essential cultural continuity from these civilisations to classical Greece was established, it became essential to see these "Mediterranean" people as northern and European, if not IE.
Unfortunately for the "Eurocentrics", the Anatolian languages proved quite fruitless as a source for the non-IE element in the Greek corpus. Consequently even more remote and obscure peoples have been mooted, but always to the north, and in particular the Caucasus.
One would have thought that by now, since the Caucasian languages have been pretty well documented, and the non-IE element in ancient Greek is so large (estimates vary between 25 to 50% of the lexicon), that reasonably definitive statements could have been made on the nature and relationships of the language(s) of the Mediterranean substratum. But, no such luck.
Why is this? I believe it's because modern scholars have been conditioned not to look at the obvious source. It's accepted as proved that Semites and Egyptians had no more than casual trading contacts with the Greeks, and that in all things, the Greeks were the dynamic force and the Levantines the passive partners. But if one looks into this "proof", it just does not stand up to scrutiny. It is founded on 19th century European racial ideas, and is not supported by the evidence - linguistic, cultural or archaeological.
So, as a parting shot, I offer you an etymology for Knossos, from a Semitic root /kns/, reflected in modern Arabic /kanîs(ah)/, "temple, church, synagogue". From the root verb /kanasa/ "to sweep", there is a form /kunâsah/ "sweepings, refuse". Could this be the threshing floor?
Cheers
Dennis