Can Linear A be deciphered?
We can sound out the writing of Minoan Crete, but we don't understand a word of the language behind it.
The question
In 1900 Arthur Evans began excavating the palace of Knossos on Crete and found clay tablets covered in an unknown script. He soon saw that there were two related writing systems, which he called Linear A and Linear B. Linear A is the older one: it was used by the Minoans, the first great civilisation of Europe, from roughly the 18th to the 15th century BC.
In 1952 Linear B was deciphered. Linear A never was. And the strange thing is that we can more or less read it aloud. Most of its signs look like Linear B signs, so we can guess how they sounded. We just don't know what the words mean, because we don't know what language the Minoans spoke.
What we know
- Linear B was deciphered by Michael Ventris, an architect who had been fascinated by the script since he was a schoolboy. Working with the philologist John Chadwick, he showed in 1952–53 that it wrote an early form of Greek. The Mycenaean Greeks had taken over the Minoan script and adapted it to their own language.
- Because Linear B grew out of Linear A, many signs probably kept similar sound values. When Linear A words are read with Linear B values, they do not look like Greek. The language is something else.
- About 1,400 Linear A inscriptions are known, most of them short. The majority are administrative records on clay: lists of goods, people and quantities, from palaces and villas across Crete and a few nearby islands. Others are carved on stone vessels used in religious offerings.
- A few things are understood from context. Numbers and measures can be read. A word read as ku-ro stands at the end of lists, where totals go, and almost certainly means "total". Some signs are pictures of what they count: wine, grain, figs, oil.
- Certain sequences repeat on offering vessels from different sites, apparently a religious formula, possibly with the name of a deity. Its meaning is unknown.
- Crete had another undeciphered script even earlier, Cretan hieroglyphic, and the famous Phaistos Disc is a third, unique object. Neither has been read either.
Main hypotheses
A lost, isolated language
The most cautious view: Minoan was a language with no surviving relatives, like many languages of the ancient Mediterranean that disappeared without a trace. If so, it may never be fully understood.
Related to a known family
Many proposals have linked Minoan to known languages: Semitic languages of the Near East, Luwian and other languages of Anatolia, Indo-Iranian languages, even an early form of Greek. Each finds some matching words. None has convinced most specialists, because with a small corpus and uncertain sound values, it is easy to find accidental matches.
Computational approaches
Recent methods from machine learning have successfully "re-deciphered" known scripts, including Linear B, by matching them against related languages. They could test hypotheses about Minoan systematically, but they need a candidate language to compare with.
Where understanding ends
Decipherments of the past all relied on one of two keys. The first is a bilingual text, like the Rosetta Stone, where the same text appears in a known script or language. The second is a known language hiding behind the script, as Greek was behind Linear B. For Linear A we have neither.
And the corpus is small and repetitive. Most texts are lists, whose words are mostly names of people and places, which tell little about grammar. Even if someone proposed the correct language today, there might not be enough text to prove it.
So the limit here is unusual. Elsewhere on this site, understanding ends at a missing theory or missing measurement. Here, the information may simply not have survived. The Minoans spoke to each other for centuries, and almost all of it is gone.
What would settle it
- A bilingual inscription, for example in Linear A and Egyptian or Akkadian, from a site where Minoans traded.
- A much larger find of Linear A texts, especially longer ones that aren't lists, such as an archive or religious texts.
- A proposed relationship to a known language that predicts the meaning of new inscriptions before they are found, and is confirmed by them.
Sources
- Ventris, M., & Chadwick, J. (1953). Evidence for Greek dialect in the Mycenaean archives. The Journal of Hellenic Studies, 73, 84–103.
- Godart, L., & Olivier, J.-P. (1976–1985). Recueil des inscriptions en linéaire A (GORILA), vols. 1–5. Paris: Geuthner (École française d'Athènes, Études crétoises 21). (Scans published by the École française d'Athènes.)
- Luo, J., Cao, Y., & Barzilay, R. (2019). Neural decipherment via minimum-cost flow: from Ugaritic to Linear B. Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 3146–3155.
- Salgarella, E. (2020). Aegean Linear Script(s): Rethinking the Relationship between Linear A and Linear B. Cambridge University Press.
- Younger, J. G. Linear A Texts & Inscriptions in Phonetic Transcription. University of Kansas.