The word 'history' actually means a period or periods of time and place when human beings left behind written records. Where a group of people had no written records, no writing, that is called prehistory. The general notion of the meaning of the word prehistoric is of dinosaurs but that's not only what it refers to. Any period without the written word is prehistoric.
But as we go back into ancient history we come to certain seemingly impassable walls, where cultures existed that had writing but are so far in the past that the knowledge of the script they used, the language they spoke and who in fact they were and where they originally came from is lost. There are different reasons for this depending upon which culture we are talking about. The script I am currently working on, the Indus Valley Script, is one example, an undeciphered script from South Asia created by the Indus Valley Civilization, which spanned over a million and a half square miles and lasted over five hundred years and which went at last to ruin, the cities becoming deserted and the people blending into the surrounding village systems. That occurred hundreds of years before the people who spoke Sanskrit arrived in South Asia, causing a break in continuity, where the new arrivals did not know about the civilization before them. All knowledge of the Indus Valley Civilization was lost until the end of the 19th century, when bits of archaeological finds from their civilization began to be discovered including objects with inscriptions in their unique script, a writing system they had invented and employed but which was lost when their civilization ebbed. This is an example of a period that is often called proto-history. It is not prehistory because there are in fact written records from that time and place and it isn't really history since we have no idea what those records say. If the script and therefore language becomes deciphered, then the Indus Valley Civilization will fall within the definition of history. Until then, it is a period of time with unreadable written records, a.k.a. proto-history.
Another example is the culture of original inhabitants of Crete, people we have oddly termed the Minoans, oddly since the name is formed after King Minos, who was Greek. One thing we are sure of, the Minoans were not Greek; they immigrated to Crete hundreds of years at least before the early Greeks arrived. The Minoans created a civilization from the ground up, developing on Crete from Neolithic or basic tool and shelter makers to palace builders, international traders, an extremely developed culture that included the invention of a writing system. But in about 1450 B.C.E. (B.C.E. is a modern term meaning "before the common era", a P.C. adaptation of B.C. in order to avoid identifying the modern era as related to Christ; we should not notice too closely that since the dates themselves are identical, "common era" in "before the common era" is therefore also dated from Christ's birth; but nevermind, you see the point, as my archaeology teacher at Cambridge, Dilip Chakrabarti, used to say)...at any rate, about 1450 B.C.E. a massive earthquake hit the nearby island of Thera as well as Crete, which was added to by an eruption of the Volcano on Thera causing a large portion of Thera to sink beneath the sea with a resulting tsumani wave that pummeled Crete. There was massive damage in the main cities and certainly enormous loss of life. Akrotiri on Thera has been excavated and it was discovered that lightweight volcanic ash had fallen, solidifying two hundred feet of pumice upon the suffocated culture. The Minoan civilization was centered primarily on these two islands and from the evidence it appears that this culture previously to the earthquake had enjoyed a peaceful existence, having no defensive walls around their cities, with lively frescoes of sport and with pottery decorated in light-hearted renderings of the natural world. It was a thriving culure that lost their spirit with the devastation, the designs on the pottery dramatic evidence of their change of heart, the joyful marine animal designs being replaced by uninspired geometric patterns on a dark dark background. There is enough evidence to know that many years before the earthquake and volcanic eruption the early Greeks had arrived in the mainland and some had traveled and settled on Crete but as a minority part of the Minoan Civilization, with their own customs and language, what we might now call an ethnic part of a larger culture. But when the Minoans experienced the disaster of 1450 B.C.E., it was not long afterwards that the Greeks began to become more powerful until they had full control of the mainland and the islands, including Crete. There are legends about what happened to the Minoans after that. Some were reported to have moved to southern Turkey, becoming the Lycians. Some researchers believe the descendants of the Minoans became the Etruscans. There are many theories. The script they invented, which is called Linear A, became adapted by the Greeks into a slightly different script that suited the Greek language. That adapted, later script is called Linear B.
Around A.D. 1900 or as we now term it C.E. 1900, meaning Common Era 1900, a man named Arthur Evans began excavating on Crete. He found the Minoan Palace at Knossos and with it inscriptions written in both Linear A & B. At that point it was believed that the Greeks had not arrived to that area of the world until several centuries later and that, therefore, neither script had anything to do with the Greek language. Both were considered to be unknown scripts used to write unknown languages.
To begin work to decipher them, objects with inscriptions were separated into two, one with inscriptions in Linear A and one with inscriptions in Linear B. Linear A was inscribed on a much smaller number of objects than Linear B so most decipherers chose to work on deciphering Linear B first. In 1950, an American woman, Dr. Alice Kober, made a significant breakthrough, discovering that the language that was written in Linear B was inflectional, meaning that it had endings, like in French or Spanish. This was a major step towards the decipherment. The reason is that all the known languages of the world have been categorized into what is called language families, which are groupings of languages that are "related" to each other. Relationships of languages can happen in two ways, due to time or due to place. Firstly, in terms of time, it is where a group of speakers continues to live in the same place for so long that the little constant changes that naturally occur to any language as it is spoken over time become so numerous that there is a break in understanding, for example, the difference between Old English and Modern English. Even just as far back as Shakespeare, as anyone who has taken courses in his work has noted, although only 400 years in the past, his English is very different from English now and can be difficult to fully understand. Secondly, in terms of place, when speakers of a language move to a different part of the world and lose contact with their earlier home, the languages in both places will continue to develop separately until first they become two dialects of the same language and finally if enough time passes, they become different languages. They become different dialects when each regularly employs different words for common meanings and/or when the accent and therefore pronunciation of words is significantly different but speakers of both can with minimal effort understand each other. They become different languages when they are mutually unintelligible. When I was at Cambridge it was often sarcastically remarked that American has become a different language from English but I would say that that's not yet accurate, though it certainly has become a different dialect. There were many things in English in England that had different words to describe them than in American English and also many of the same words used in England and America had different meanings. Some examples are: the word "vest" in America means that sleeveless pocketed thing that goes between the shirt and jacket but in England "vest" means undershirt. If you want to talk about the thing that goes between the shirt and jacket in England you have to use the word "waistcoat". In England "pants" mean panties whereas in America "pants" means trousers. In England "jumper" means pullover sweater whereas in America "jumper" means a little girl's dress. When I hadn't been at Cambridge long, I happened to phone my brother. I told him the examples above. He said, ok, how about this: an American guy and an Englishman were invited to a party and someone asked them what they were going to wear. The American replied, "Pants and a vest," and the Englishman replied, "A jumper."
At any rate, I was talking about language families. A single language family is made up of all of the languages that originated from the same language in the past and are therefore related to each other. The largest language family in the world, for example, is the Indo-European Language Family, which includes, among many others, English, French, German, Hindi, Greek and Farsi, all of which came from the same original tongue, a theoretical language that we term Proto-Indo-European. One of the strongest features of Indo-European languages is the use of endings, such as suffixes in English applied to nouns, such as "ness" in happiness and verbal endings that indicate whether a verb is describing first, second or third person (I, you, he/she) in French, such as "j'arrive" means "I arrive" but "tu arrives" means "you arrive". Notice that in "j'arrive", the end of arrive employs an "e" but in "tu arrives" the end of arrive employs "es". In some inflected languages, such as Spanish, it is not necessary to say I or you or he as the ending already indicates which is meant.
Language families are defined in part by features, such as if they employ suffixes or prefixes, what order the words must have in a sentence and the list of sounds that are used to speak the language. If they are related languages belonging in the same language family, they will share many if not all of the same features and not have features that are used in languages that belong in a different language family. When Dr. Kober discovered that Linear B was using endings, she identified which language families the script might represent and which languages families it did not. This was a significant step forward.
Dr. Kober very sadly and unfortunately died of cancer before she could complete the decipherment. Her work was adopted and acknowledged by an English architect named Michael Ventris, who completed the decipherment a couple of years later, in 1952. He discovered that the language written in the Linear B script was Greek. Up to that point it was believed that the Greeks had arrived much later. The earliest written records up until then were by Homer (the Iliad and Odyssey Homer), whose own dates are still controversial, some researchers claiming he lived around 1190 B.C.E and some claiming around 850 B.C.E. Either way, at the very least there is therefore a three hundred year span between the Greek that Homer used and the Greek of the people who lived at the time of the devastation of Crete used. It was believed up until then, also, that the war at Troy, described by Homer, was a myth. But when Linear B was deciphered and it was discovered that the Greeks had come to Greece so long before it was first supposed and this discovery combined with the archaeological find of the layered cities of Troy by Heinrich Schliemann in the late nineteenth century, it was determined that the description of the war at Troy was very real indeed. In other words, the decipherment of Linear B aided significantly in taking the history of Greece several hundred years back in time, changing myth to fact, identifying major events in the past to be taken seriously as actual history. This is the most important result of ancient language decipherment.
Michael Ventris had planned on working on the decipherment of the earlier script, Linear A, when he had finished dotting the i's of his work on Linear B. But, very strangely and sadly, he too died, in the next year, 1953, in a car crash. Since then many researchers have attempted the decipherment of Linear A, the script invented by the Minoans of Crete to use when writing their language, which is to date, also unknown. But no one has yet succeeded.
A bit should be said about what the two scripts are like, as neither are an alphabet. In the earliest period when writing systems were first being invented, the incredible thinkers who came up with this idea attempted to identify what a spoken word was in fact; in other words, what were the smallest bits they could hear that made up any word. They could not or did not see it as individual consonants and individual vowels as our alphabet represents. They heard syllables as the smallest units, ka being separate from ke being separate from ki being separate from ko being separate from ku, and so on, each consonant attached to as many vowels as they used. That may sound cumbersome but when we say one of the consonants in our alphabet, we do not reproduce the actual sound of it that we use when that consonant is being said within a word. For example, if we were to say aloud the word "potato", the first letter would be pronounced by a slight puff of air being produced by pressing the lips together and then releasing them. Try it. But if you were to say aloud the name of the letter "p", you would actually say, "Pee". But you would not pronounce "potato" as "pee-otato". If you said aloud the name of the "t" in "potato", you would say aloud "Tee". But you would not pronounce the word "potato" as "po-tee-a-tee-o". Instead, the ancient original inventors of script chose to write words in terms of the syllables they could actually hear, so that if they were to write the word "potato", they would have spelled it as they heard it, by three signs that represented the three syllables, one for "po", one for "ta" and one for "to". And therefore, instead of 26 signs or as people generally call them, letters, they would have the number of consonants they used times the number of vowels they used. The Greeks who wrote in Linear B, who were the Mycenaean Greeks, used arguably twelve consonants and five vowels as well as five signs that represented simply the five vowels and fifteen signs that represented more complicated sounds or syllables, such as dipthongs and therefore the list of signs in Linear B that represent sounds in their language was seventy-eight signs long, give or take. They also created signs that represented whole words, such as 'wine' 'oil' 'grain' and many others, to use in accounting and trade, which are called ideograms or logograms, but that is not part of the discussion here. The Linear A sign list is seventy-five signs long and it is because of this number of signs that researchers assume that Linear A also is a syllabary. The way it's usually put is if it's 20+ signs, it's an alphabet, if it's 80+ signs it's a syllabary and if it's 10,000 signs it's Chinese. There are other types of scripts, the abjad, the abujida but that's for some other day, maybe. The point that has interested me is that Linear A remains to date undeciphered.
