Linear A, the Minoan script no one has deciphered

At the beginning of the twentieth century the British archaeologist Arthur Evans, excavating the palace of Knossos in Crete, found hundreds of clay tablets inscribed with unknown signs. He distinguished two linear scripts, which he called Linear A and Linear B. The second was deciphered in the middle of the century. The first, the script of Minoan civilisation, remains one of the great riddles of Mediterranean archaeology.

A Bronze Age script

Linear A was used in Crete and on some Aegean islands roughly between the eighteenth and fifteenth centuries BC. More than a thousand inscriptions are known, but almost all are very short, often only a few words. The largest group comes from the site of Hagia Triada, in the south of the island, not far from Phaistos, where an archive of administrative tablets was found.

Besides the tablets, the script appears on stone objects meant for ritual offerings, such as the libation tables found in peak sanctuaries, on vases and on small metal objects. These votive inscriptions contain formulas repeated from one place to another, probably invocations or dedications, whose exact sense is unknown. Some of these formulas appear identically on objects found far apart.

The key of Linear B

In 1952 the English architect Michael Ventris showed that Linear B recorded an early form of Greek, Mycenaean. Since many Linear B signs derive from Linear A, it is possible to give the latter an approximate phonetic value and to pronounce, at least in part, Minoan words, as one does with a text in a foreign language whose alphabet is known.

The problem is that the sounds obtained in this way match no known language. Affinities with Anatolian, Semitic and Indo-European languages have been proposed, but none has been confirmed. Reading the signs does not mean understanding the language, and the inscriptions are too short and repetitive for its grammar to be reconstructed with the methods used for other ancient scripts.

What can be understood

Something, however, can be grasped. The administrative tablets use ideograms for goods such as grain, wine, oil and figs, and a decimal number system that can be read with certainty, including some fractions. Scholars can thus recognise lists, totals and accounting records, even without understanding the names. Some recurring words, such as one that seems to mean a total, have been identified with good probability.

These records reveal an organised palace economy that controlled harvests, stores and distributions. The picture is similar to that emerging from the Linear B tablets of the Mycenaean palaces, which partly inherited the Minoan administrative system. The difference is that, for the Minoans, we know the numbers but not the words that go with them.

Linear A is one of the great undeciphered scripts of antiquity, alongside that of the Phaistos Disc, which comes from the same island. Every new inscription found in excavations adds a few words to the small repertoire of signs, and with it the hope that one day the language of the Minoans will make itself understood again.