preGreek

Pre-Greek is a term used in linguistics, archaeology, and classical studies to describe the languages and writing systems that existed in the Aegean region before the earliest securely identified Greek texts. It does not denote a single language but a category of Bronze Age traditions that preceded Greek literacy in inscriptions and literature.

In Crete and nearby areas, the Minoan civilization produced scripts such as Cretan hieroglyphs (in use roughly 1900–1450 BCE) and Linear A (circa 1800–1450 BCE). The underlying Minoan language of Linear A remains undeciphered and is generally regarded as non-Greek. On Cyprus and related regions, the Cypro-Minoan syllabary appears in the late Bronze Age and is also undeciphered; it is commonly linked to a pre-Greek linguistic stage, with scholarly debate about its exact relationships to Minoan and Greek.

Mycenaean Greece, from about 1600–1100 BCE, used Linear B, a script that records an early form of Greek. After its decipherment by Michael Ventris in 1952, Linear B was shown to encode Mycenaean Greek, the oldest known directly attested form of the Greek language. Thus, Linear B marks a transition from the broader pre-Greek milieu to Greek itself, while Linear A and Cypro-Minoan represent non-Greek languages and scripts of the era.

The term pre-Greek also encompasses potential substrate influences and other non-Greek languages present in the Aegean before Greek became the dominant linguistic tradition.