Varga Géza írástörténész

2026. szeptember 14., hétfő

Cretan Protolinear Signs of Evangelos C. Papakitsos Record Attributes of the God of the Hungarians

Introduction

Evangelos C. Papakitsos published an article on academia.edu titled Culturally Important Objects as Signs of Cretan Protolinear Script. In this work, he presents seven "syllabaries" of the Cretan Protolinear script, which contain consonant-vowel type syllabic signs. In the current article, I equate two of these Cretan syllabic signs with Székely runic letters and word-signs of Hungarian hieroglyphic script. The latter record the Hungarian words Él, élő (Living) and Jó, javas (Good/Healer). These Hungarian common words are attributes of the God of the Hungarians, and at the same time, names of gods revered for millennia, which belong to the same word family as the names Allah/Elohim or Yahweh. We find these same two divine names in the names of the cities Aleppo ("Living Tree") and Jaffa ("Good Tree"), as well.

Figure 1. The syllabary presented by E. C. Papakitsos belongs to the family of the Székely script sign "l" (Él, élő); the sign records the sound "l"

These shared signs of the Cretan and Hungarian character sets originate from the widely spread symbol repertoire of the Stone Age Old Religion. They were preserved during the development of the Cretan script because the names of the gods enjoyed outstanding veneration. Due to their widespread familiarity, the Cretans could not abandon the use of these signs even when expanding the character set became necessary due to the emergence of the state and the needs of bookkeeping.

Hungarian Parallels of the Cretan Él Hieroglyph

If Evangelos C. Papakitsos considers the sign shown in Figure 1 to be the symbol for the sound "l", or a syllable containing the sound "l", this can be excellently supported by Hungarian parallels.

The syllabary presents pictographs depicting rain, rivers, and water, thereby recording the divine name Él, the "living" attribute of God. Among the Cretan signs shown in Figure 1, two have Hungarian equivalents. The Cretan sign is related to Halaf signs, as well as the Székely runic letter "l" and the Hungarian hieroglyphic script used since the Stone Age (Figures 2 and 3). This syllabary is a snapshot of a segment of a writing process spanning several millennia and valid over vast territories. The Cretan sign variants help us understand why the Hungarian Él hieroglyph and the Székely letter "l" have similar formal variations.

Figure 2. Top left: a ligature of the Halaf culture (British Museum); right: a Cretan protolinear sign (after E. C. Papakitsos). Both signs are ligatures formed from the Székely signs "n" (nagy/great) and "l" (Él) seen in the bottom left corner, both reading "Nagy Él" (Great Living God)

Figure 3. A Cretan protolinear sign (after E. C. Papakitsos, left) and one form of the Székely runic letter "l" (Él, élő) (right)

Figure 4. Halaf idols marked with the Él hieroglyph (after Stuart Campbell and Aurelie Daems) prove that Él was a goddess

The Cretan Jó "River" Hieroglyph

Evangelos C. Papakitsos believes that the syllabary shown in Figure 5 depicts threshing floors: "It was the ground plan of a threshing floor, probably outlined to indicate the circular movement of animals while threshing the harvested grain stalks." This might be true for the signs under d, e, f, ó, and g, but it is not true for the others on the left, which are not circular but winding shapes. That is, they depict wave crests crashing toward the sky, thereby evoking the Milky Way, which is identified with God (Figures 5 and 6). This winding shape is related to the letter "j" of the Székely script, and in the antecedent of the Székely script, the Hungarian hieroglyphic script, it is the hieroglyph for jó "river".

Figure 5. The syllabary presented by E. C. Papakitsos with many winding shapes

The images and sign parallels below reveal the pictorial content and meaning of the winding shape (Figures 6–12). They make it obvious that this is an Old Religion hieroglyph, the name of the Jó (Good) God identified with the heavenly river.

Figure 6. The Great Wave off Kanagawa, woodblock print by Katsushika Hokusai; the winding wave is the hieroglyph for jó "river", while the mountain is the pictograph for sar "corner, lord"

The image shown in Figure 6 has deep spiritual and religious significance, directly connected to Mount Fuji visible in the background, as well as contemporary Japanese religious beliefs. For the Japanese public and the artist, Katsushika Hokusai, the work spoke of the quest for immortality.

In Shintoism and Buddhism, Fuji is not merely a mountain, but the dwelling place of a deity, the axis connecting Earth with Heaven. During the Edo period, a highly popular religious sect existed called Fujikō. Its members climbed the mountain as a sacred pilgrimage because they believed that reaching the summit purifies the soul and brings one closer to the afterlife (the heavenly sphere).

In both a compositional and spiritual sense, the image refers to the path leading to heaven. Hokusai created a visual corridor that guides the viewer's eye through the churning waves toward the distant peak of Fuji. While the fishing boats plunge helplessly into the trough of the waves, Fuji standing in the background is the symbol of immobility, eternity, and spiritual refuge. From turbulent earthly destruction (the wave), our gaze escapes through the mountain toward the peaceful, clear sky. Thus, the composition subtly conveys the Buddhist idea: behind worldly suffering and chaos lies the permanent, spiritual truth, the path leading to heaven.

Figure 7. Left: a La Tolita world model; right: a world model from a painted chest of Velemér, both depicting the four sacred rivers of Eden with winding shapes; the Velemér version also shows the central source

La Tolita is the name of a major archaeological site and culture that flourished on the borderlands of Ecuador and Colombia from 500 BC to 500 AD in northern Ecuador, Esmeraldas province, as well as on the island of Tumaco in Colombia. The masters of this culture produced stunning gold and platinum objects, masks, and pectorals. The correspondence between the La Tolita and Velemér world models shown in Figure 7 proves that the Hungarian hieroglyphs forming the elements of these world models already existed and were widely known at least 12,000 years ago. The American Indians preserved the memory of the common ancestral homeland of 50,000 years earlier, the Eden around Ararat, along with the Hungarian Old Religion character set already used there at that time.

Figure 8. Pottery from Velemér with an "Őrség winged sun-disk" pattern, depicting the central source and four sacred rivers of Eden; on the bottom right of the diagram are the Székely script signs "j" (jó "river"), "d" (Dana "god"), and "ly" (lyuk, Lyukó "the name of the god")

Figure 9. The St. Christopher fresco of Martjanci (Mártonhely, Slovenia); at the saint's feet, the river is depicted with winding shapes, the hieroglyphs for jó "river"

Figure 10. The veranda pillar of Gömör is the world pillar holding the sky, fulfilling the role of the Milky Way in the folk symbolism that correlates the house and the cosmos; therefore, the hieroglyph jó "river" appears on the brace, the reading of the two signs being: Jó Üdő (Sun God identified with a river)

The radial sun symbol used on the Gömör veranda pillar (the word-sign Üdő "time") is related to the sign of the Sumerian sun god Utu "time" found in Hittite hieroglyphic writing, except that there, six rays emanate from it. Its variant can also be found on the Okunev steles of the Scythians, which makes it understandable why the Scythian sun god was called Oitosyros. This Scythian Oitosyros is identical to the Sumero-Akkadian expression Utu sar "Time Lord". Both the Sumerian and the Scythian name variants are almost comprehensible in Hungarian.

Figure 11. The reverse of an ancient Greek coin shows that the swastika originally consists of four independent jó "river" hieroglyphs, which evoke the sacred rivers of Eden

The swastika is a ligature formed from four Hungarian jó "river" hieroglyphs, the center of which forms a cross (a symbol of god) with the reading Dana (Figure 11). This Hungarian Dana hieroglyph is related to the Sumerian dingir "god" sign, which also has a cross-shaped variant. From the swastika, the sentence Jó Dana ("Good God") can be read four times.

Figure 12. On the Scythian stag of Tápiószentmárton, we find the jó hieroglyph, because he is the zoomorphic form or representative of the God identified with the heavenly river

Figure 13. An idol of the Tordos-Vinca culture, with the hieroglyphic sentence "Jó sar" (in modern Hungarian: Jó úr / Good Lord, or River Lord) on its abdomen

Figure 13 is a depiction of a deity, on which, as usual, the designation appears: the name and title of the god. Just as we write "Lajos Kossuth" on the pedestal of a Kossuth statue, our ancestors living 6,000 years ago acted similarly when they inscribed the name and title of the god on the idol. This is obvious proof that the winding shape is the name of the Jó God.

Figure 14. An Indian clay model of the Jóma ligature, depicting the heavenly river (the Milky Way) leading to the heights with the help of the Hungarian jó and magas hieroglyphs

The presented images adequately verify that the winding shape depicts water, a wave crest crashing toward the sky, and can be identified with the path leading to heaven (Figure 14), the Milky Way identified with God. Based on the initial sound "j" preserved in the Székely script, this is the logogram for jó, which once also meant "river" and is connected to the name of the god Jó, Yahweh. Due to its widespread occurrence, it is a Stone Age sign, which was naturally known and used in Bronze Age Crete as well.

The Cretan Protolinear Script

According to the introduction of his article, Evangelos C. Papakitsos follows the theory of Cretan Protolinear (CP) script. According to this, all Aegean scripts developed from this script, including Linear A, Cretan hieroglyphs, and Linear B. The seven syllabaries of this set, according to the author, depict inanimate objects or structures that were very common or important in daily life, economy, and religion. He also demonstrates that the phonetic value of each syllabary corresponds to the Sumerian name of the object represented by the syllabary in a conservative dialect. Thus, more light is shed on the linguistic origins of the Aegean scripts, the practice followed during their creation, and indirectly on certain cultural aspects of the Minoan civilization.

For us, this article is interesting due to two circumstances:

One is that among the signs on the syllabaries presented by the author, two can be identified with the symbols of the Hungarian hieroglyphic script.
The other circumstance is that Simo Parpola classified Sumerian among the Uralic languages, defining it as a relative of Hungarian.

The theory of Cretan Protolinear script is a scientific hypothesis explaining the development of Aegean Bronze Age writing systems. The essence of the theory is that between early Minoan pictographic writing (Cretan hieroglyphs) and the later, well-known linear Linear A script, there existed a transitional, so-called proto-linear phase.

British archaeologist Arthur Evans, based on his excavations in Crete, divided the development of literacy into three consecutive stages:

Cretan hieroglyphs (ca. 2000–1650 BC): Strongly pictographic, image-like symbols.
Proto-linear and Linear A script (ca. 1800–1450 BC): The pictorial signs transformed into simplified, faster-to-write, abstract lines (linear).
Linear B script (ca. 1400–1200 BC): A syllabary adopted from Linear A by the Mycenaean Greeks and adapted to their own language.

According to the protolinear theory, the shift from complex pictographic writing to linear script did not happen suddenly. The administrative needs of the palace economies (fast accounting, inventorying) required the rapid writing of signs. In the transitional phase, the signs still retained their original pictorial contours but became more cursive, "handwriting-like". The signs of the Cretan Protolinear script were simultaneously pictorial and linear. Each sign was a sketch based on which everyone could easily recognize a familiar object, named by the phonetic value of the sign. All sign names were identified as monosyllabic.

Although early theories suggested that Linear A developed directly from hieroglyphs, modern research nuances this picture. The two writing systems coexisted for a time in Crete (hieroglyphs were mainly used on seals, early linear forms on clay tablets). There are also scholarly opinions suggesting that the protolinear form did not spring from a single stem but was part of a regional script development experiment. Since the language of Linear A (and thus the protolinear stage) remains undeciphered to this day, the exact details of the theory and the precise sound values of the signs continue to be the subject of linguistic debates.

In this debate, a new argument is presented by the Hungarian hieroglyphic script, which I brought to the public in 2017 as a result of nearly 50 years of research. This script served as the symbol system of the Stone Age Old Religion. Its 40 hieroglyphs known so far—in accordance with their function—rendered it suitable only for writing short Old Religion prayers. Based on the readings, these hieroglyphs recorded words and sentences from the beginning. Their form was also much more modern (more linear) than expected based on common "scholarly" explanations, which is well illustrated by the 15,000-year-old Mas d'Azil signs. The more pictorial and the more linear sign forms coexisted from the beginning and still coexist today, because depending on the purpose, sometimes one, sometimes the other was applied. The Hungarian hieroglyphic script spread from the Pyrenees to America as early as the Paleolithic. Based on the occurrences of the szabír ős (Sabir ancestor) sentence-sign, these hieroglyphs were used by those Sabir/Hurrian peoples who developed the achievements of the Neolithic revolution and spread them over long millennia. This is why the Sabir ethnonym recorded with the hieroglyph appears at Göbekli Tepe, in Egypt, in the Indus Valley, in the Carpathian-Balkan region, in Etruria, and on the steppe too.

Notes

(1) The Székely script is a writing system of mixed character (containing word-, syllable-, and sentence-signs as well as letters, but mostly used alphabetically). It is still in use in Hungary today. Originally it served as the character set of the Stone Age Old Religion and has come down to us from it; therefore, its signs, almost without exception, record the components of the word Isten (God), or additional names and attributes of God. These divine names and attributes are still known today in Eurasia and America. The earlier version of the writing system applying word- and sentence-signs, the Hungarian hieroglyphic script, was presented by me in 2017. Its word-signs and short texts are still used by folk art today on painted Easter eggs or on pottery, but we also find them among the elements of heraldry, e.g., the Hungarian state coat of arms, as well as in religious sign usage.

(2) According to a mythological explanation, Jaffa was founded by Noah's son, Japheth, after the Deluge, and the settlement preserves his name. Pomponius Mela (mid-1st century AD) mentions in his work De situ orbis that Joppe is an extremely ancient city, built even before the flood. Pliny the Elder (23–79 AD), in Book 5 of his Naturalis Historia (Natural History), also describes that according to tradition, Joppe is older than the flood itself (antiquior terrarum inundatione ut ferunt).

According to Simon Kézai's chronicle, we Hungarians are descendants of Japheth.

All this is confirmed by the fact that in Greek mythology, Iapetos (Iapetus) is a Titan, the forefather of humanity, the father of Prometheus. In Greek mythology, it is Deucalion (Iapetos's grandson) who survives the Greeks' great, deluge-like cataclysm. The ancient Hellenized Jewish writers and the early Church Fathers were therefore firmly convinced that the Greeks' Iapetos and the biblical Japheth represent the same memory, only in a different language. To which we may add that Greek mythology may largely originate from the Sabirs who reached the Carpathian-Balkan region and the steppe from Anatolia; this is why many Greek divine names have Hungarian connections (Athena – ten, Apollo – ápoló [nurturer], Attis – atya [father], Heracles – her Ak am, Ak úr [Lord Ak] or Óg úr [Lord Og], Perseus – perzsel [scorch]).

The Greek meaning of Perseus's name is "The Destroyer". In the martial culture of steppe peoples (and also in the old Hungarian language), the most common form of destruction was burning down, scorching (felperzselés). Behind the Greek perthein and the Hungarian perzsel may lie the same ancient, Eurasian conceptual root of "destruction by fire". Perseus is the son of Zeus, who begot him in the bronze tower in the form of a golden shower (pure light). Perseus is therefore the "Son of Light". We use the Hungarian word perzsel most frequently, alongside fire, for the scorching, blazing sun ("perzsel a nap" / the sun is scorching). In this logic, the name Perseus manifests the scorching divine energy and light descending from the sky.

These fragments of memory resonate with the proto-historical picture emerging on the basis of the occurrences of the szabír ős sentence-sign, according to which both the Neolithic revolution and the Bronze Age economic-cultural expansion were determined by the Sabirs who used the ancestor or relative of the Hungarian language.

(3) Simo Parpola's position is supported by the fact that among the earliest Sumerian signs scratched into clay, more than twenty can be identified with the signs of the Hungarian hieroglyphic script (Figure 15). Not only their form, but in several cases their meaning and phonetic shape are also identical or related to their Hungarian equivalents. According to Simo Parpola, the Sumerians are descendants of the population of the Halaf (and Ubaid) culture. This can also be supported by script-historical data, namely that all 32 Halaf signs known so far can be identified with Hungarian hieroglyphs (Figure 16).

The Hungarian hieroglyphic script was the symbol system of the Stone Age Old Religion, which spread from the Pyrenees to America already in the Stone Age. From this was preserved, among others, the character set or a few signs of the Halaf, Sumerian, and Cretan protolinear symbol systems. The series of similar symbol systems (containing Hungarian hieroglyphs) can be supplemented with Hittite (Luwian), Tepe Yahya, Indus Valley, Egyptian, Danubian (Tordos-Vinca), and other scripts as well. That is, it is not necessary to derive the Cretan protolinear signs from Sumerian, because this is not the only possible path. The Sumerian-identical phonetic shapes and meanings appearing in Crete are important, but they may also originate from the ancestor of Sumerian, the Halaf words.

Figure 15. Correspondences between the earliest Sumerian signs and the Hungarian character set

Figure 16. Among the similar signs of the Halaf culture and the Hungarian character set, the Árpád stripes, the triple mount, and the double cross can still be seen today in the Hungarian state coat of arms

The Uralic languages developed only after Sumerian, from new mixed languages born along the stations of the Seima-Turbino culture, an ore-prospecting and metal-trade route. The Seima-Turbino culture dates to the end of the Early Bronze Age, between 2200 and 1900 BC. The organizers and maintainers of this trade route were the Sabir-Hurrian peoples.

(4) According to the Byzantine Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus, Sabir (in his work: Sabartoi asphaloi) is the old name of the Hungarians. Therefore, it is understandable why the Hungarian hieroglyphic script used by the peoples of the Neolithic revolution survived in its most faithful form precisely among the Hungarians. Such a script-historical tradition was preserved by the Székely script, as well as by folk (e.g., painted Easter eggs), sovereign (e.g., the Hungarian state coat of arms), and religious sign usage (e.g., frescoes of Árpád-era churches). Examples of this hieroglyphic sign usage turn up by the hundreds on archaeological finds from the Stone Age to the present day (e.g., in the Tordos-Vinca culture, and on the written monuments of the Huns and the Avars).

These are known connections, which nevertheless sound novel in international scholarly literature. According to Hungarian historical tradition, the Hungarians are descendants of the Scythians and the Huns. Jordanes identified the Sabirs with the true Huns. Therefore, traditional assessments rightfully called our script Hunnish-Scythian script. To which today we only have to add, for example based on what was discussed above, that the steppe writing culture is tied by a thousand threads to the sign usage of the Neolithic revolution, the early Sabirs, and their environment. After the surrender at Világos, however, the academic "science" blending into the political landscape overwrote the Hunnish-Scythian tradition and for about a hundred and fifty years—defying the facts present on Scythian, Hunnish, and Avarian archaeological finds—tried to derive the Székely script from the Old Turkic script. They never succeeded in this, but the monopoly on book publishing prevented the appearance of criticism and the public awareness of the failure of this preconception. Thanks to this, a false image of the Székely script appeared and became widely known in the international scientific world. However, learning the facts can help the best researchers out of this trap.

Figure 17. Out of the 210 signs of the Tordos-Vinca culture published by Winn, 49 match the signs of the Hungarian character set in terms of their form

Literature and Author

Evangelosz C. Papakitszosz (2018): Kulturálisan fontos tárgyak, mint a krétai protolineáris írás jelei (academia.edu)

Marija Gimbutas (1989): The Language of the Goddess (Az istennő nyelve), Thames and Hudson, London

Stuart Campbell (2010): Understanding symbols: putting meaning into the painted pottery of prehistoric northern Mesopotamia (A szimbólumok megértése: tartalommal megtölteni az észak-mezopotámiai őskori festett kerámiákat), Az állam előtti közösségek fejlődése az ókori Közel-Keleten: Tanulmányok Edgar Peltenburg tiszteletére (147-155. o.), Oxbow Book

Stuart Campbell - Aurelie Daems (2017): Figurines in Prehistoric Mesopotamia, The Oxford Handbook of Prehistoric Figurines, Szerk.: Timothy Insoll, Oxford University Press, Oxford, Egyesült Királyság

Simo Parpola (2010): Sumerian: A Uralic Language (I), in L. Kogan et al. (eds.), Language in the Ancient Near East. Proceedings of the 53 e Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, Vol. I, Pt. 2 (Babel und Bibel 4/2, Winona Lake, Indiana): 181–210

Simo Parpola (2016): Etymological Dictionary of the Sumerian Language, Winona Lake, Indiana: The Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project, Pp. xliv + 426; xxviii + 436.