Minoan Crete

The Akkadian name Kaptara appears in the archives of Mari on the middle Euphrates in the eighteenth century BCE, where a “man of Kaptara” receives tin and Kaptaran goods are listed, and in the geographical tradition as a far land beyond the sea. It is generally identified with Crete, and the adjective kaptarûm describes prestige goods of the Minoan trade reaching inland Mesopotamia.

Kaptara is the Mesopotamian witness to the Bronze Age name, the form that ties the Aegean island into the cuneiform world. With the Ugaritic Kptr and the Hebrew Kaftor it makes a clean Semitic-and-Akkadian set, three forms of one name for the land at the western edge of the known sea; the identification with Crete, secure enough to be the standard view, rests on this convergence rather than on any single decisive text. Through Mari’s account-tablets, the palaces of Knossos reached as far as the Euphrates, if only as the mark on a bale of luxury goods.

The Egyptian name Keftiu (kftjw) names a land and people across the sea, shown in New Kingdom tomb-paintings, above all the tomb of the vizier Rekhmire, as envoys in kilts bearing Aegean vessels; the list of Amenhotep III at Kom el-Hetan heads Keftiu over a string of recognizably Cretan towns, Knossos, Phaistos, Amnissos. The writing is group-spelling of a foreign name, and its orthography varies from text to text; the form here is one attested writing among several.

Keftiu is included as the Egyptian member of the Kaphtor family, but its identification is marked disputed, and genuinely so. The mainstream view equates Keftiu with Minoan Crete and joins it to the Semitic Kaptara/Kaftor, but a real scholarly minority has placed it in Cilicia or, reading the accompanying phrase “those in the midst of the Great Green” as the Nile Delta marshes, in Egypt itself; the equation also seems to broaden and drift in the centuries after the 18th Dynasty. Keftiu is thus the weakest joint in the Bronze Age cluster, the place where the chain of one-name-across-many-lands is most argued over, and the prose here keeps that argument open rather than settling it.

The Mycenaean Greek name of the island, ke-re-te, written in Linear B on the tablets of Knossos, the oldest form of the Greek name Krḗtē and the ancestor of Latin Creta and the modern “Crete.” It comes from the very palace archive of the Mycenaean Greeks who took over Crete after about 1450 BCE, the administrators who ran Knossos in Greek while the Minoan civilization was passing.

ke-re-te is the deepest root of the Krḗtē family, predating Homer by half a millennium, and it sets up the page’s central contrast in a single moment of time. In the same Late Bronze Age, the literate Near East still called the island by the old Semitic-Aegean name of the Kaphtor cluster, Egyptian Keftiu, Ugaritic Kptr, while the Greeks newly arrived on Crete itself were already writing ke-re-te. The two unrelated names for one island, the Eastern Kaphtor and the Greek Krēt-, are attested side by side in the same century, the older name fading just as the one that would win first appears in writing.

The Ugaritic name Kptr, written in the alphabetic cuneiform of Ugarit, is the home of Kothar-wa-Khasis, the divine craftsman and smith of Canaanite myth, who forges Baal’s weapons and builds his palace; in the Baal Cycle his seat Kptr stands in poetic parallel with Ḥkpt, Egypt-Memphis, the two great centers of skilled craft at the edges of the Ugaritic world. It is the same Bronze Age name as the Akkadian Kaptara and the Hebrew Kaftor.

Kptr gives the Bronze Age name a mythological weight the others lack. To the poets of Ugarit, Crete was not just a trading partner across the water but the workshop of a god, the place from which fine metalwork and craft came, exactly the reputation Minoan goods had earned. That a Canaanite myth should locate the home of the divine smith on the island whose palaces produced the Aegean’s finest bronzes is a quiet confirmation, from the side of legend, of what the Mari tablets record from the side of trade.

The Hebrew name Kaftor, Caphtor, is the homeland from which the Philistines came: Amos has the LORD bring “the Philistines from Caphtor” as he brought Israel from Egypt, and the Table of Nations and Deuteronomy name the Caphtorim, the people of Caphtor. It is the Bronze Age Kaptara/Kptr name in Hebrew dress, the far island remembered in Israel as the origin of its coastal neighbors and rivals.

Kaftor is the most familiar member of the cluster and the one whose identification is most worth hedging. The equation of Caphtor with Crete is the standard modern view, and it fits the archaeology of the Philistines’ Aegean origins; but the Bible itself files Caphtor under Egypt in the Table of Nations, and the ancient rabbinic translators rendered it not as Crete but as Cappadocia. The word is securely attested; what it points to is the open question, and Caphtor is a good reminder that a name can be certain while its place on the map is not.

The Greek name of the island, Krḗtē, already old by the time of Homer, who calls it the land “of ninety cities” and the realm of Minos, the king who kept the Minotaur in the Labyrinth and gave the sea its first navy. The name is pre-Greek, of unknown meaning, inherited by the Greeks from the older population of the Aegean along with the memory of the lost palatial age; it is recorded in Mycenaean Linear B as ke-re-te centuries before Homer.

Krḗtē is the name that displaced the other. It belongs to a wholly separate tradition from the Bronze Age Kaphtor, with which it shares nothing but the island it names, and it is the form that won: through Latin Creta and the Greek of the New Testament it reached every later language, and it is “Crete” today. The Minoans’ own name for their island is lost, the Bronze Age Near East’s name for it faded, and the word that endured is the one the incoming Greeks brought to a civilization already centuries gone.

The Latin name of the island, Creta, taken directly from the Greek Krḗtē, the form under which Rome annexed the island as a province in 67 BCE and through which the name passed into the European languages. Latin authors knew Crete as the island of Minos and of the hundred cities, and as a byword, in the proverb Cretizare cum Cretensi, “to play the Cretan with a Cretan,” for cunning.

Creta is the western terminus of the Greek name, the unremarkable but decisive link by which Krḗtē became the modern “Crete.” Where the Bronze Age Kaphtor family died with the languages that carried it, the Greek name went on through Latin to the whole of Europe, the standard pattern of this atlas by which a Greek form, frozen in Latin, outlives every older name for the same place. The island of the first European civilization is known to the world by the word of the Greeks who came after it, in the spelling Rome gave that word.

The Syriac name of the island, Qreṭē, taken from the Greek of the New Testament, where Crete is the scene of the most harrowing stretch of Paul’s voyage to Rome: the ship coasts in the lee of Qreṭē, puts in at Fair Havens, and is then caught off the island by the great northeaster that drives it, fourteen days, to shipwreck on Malta. The Peshitta carries the Greek name with the Syriac qōp̄ for the Greek kappa.

Qreṭē is the eastern, Christian end of the Greek name’s travels, the same road that took Athens and Macedonia into Syriac through the Acts of the Apostles. It belongs to the Krḗtē family, not the Bronze Age Kaphtor cluster, even though the Syriac-speaking church stood heir to the Aramaic world that had once known the island as Kptr: by Late Antiquity the old Bronze Age name was long forgotten, and Crete came to the Syriac Bible only as the Greeks’ island, a waypoint in the apostle’s journey west.