Tea at Trianon: DNA Analysis Reveals Minoan and Mycenaean Genetic Origins

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, August 19, 2023

DNA Analysis Reveals Minoan and Mycenaean Genetic Origins

From The Greek Reporter:

Dr Iosif Lazaridis from Harvard Medical School in Massachusetts and colleagues focused on burials from the Minoan civilization, which flourished on the island of Crete from 2,600 to 1,100 BC, and the Mycenaean culture, which existed across Greece from 1,600 to 1,100 BC. Dr Lazaridis explained that most of the people who created these civilizations appear to be local, deriving between 62 percent and 86 percent of their ancestry from people who introduced agriculture to Europe from Anatolia (modern Turkey) in Neolithic times beginning about seven thousand years ago.
But the Bronze Age Mycenaean and Minoan skeletons revealed ancestry from populations originating in either the Caucasus mountains or Iran. Between 9 percent and 17 percent of their genetic make-up came from this source. In addition, the team’s paper in the journal, Nature, reports, the Mycenaeans—but not the Minoans—show evidence of genetic input from people who lived further north on the flat grasslands that stretch from eastern Europe to Central Asia. Between four percent and sixteen percent of their ancestry came from this northern source.

While the Mycenaeans are known to have spoken an early form of Greek, the earliest recorded language spoken by the Minoan people on Crete, known as Linear A, can be read but not translated, implying that it belongs to a distinct but unknown group of languages. (Read more.)