Cretan hieroglyphs


Cretan hieroglyphs are a hieroglyphic writing system used in early Bronze Age Crete, during the Minoan era. It predates Linear A by about a century, but the two writing systems continued to be used in parallel for most of their history., it is undeciphered.

Corpus

As of 1989, the corpus of Cretan hieroglyphic inscriptions included two parts:
  • Seals and sealings, 150 documents with 307 sign-groups, using 832 signs in all.
  • Other documents on clay, 120 documents with 274 sign-groups, using 723 signs.
More documents, such as those from the Petras deposit, have been published since then. A four sided prism was found in 2011 at Vrysinas in western Crete.
These inscriptions were mainly excavated at four locations:
  • "Quartier Mu" at Malia
  • Malia palace
  • Knossos
  • the Petras deposit, 12 clay documents, 5 seal impressions, and 6 seals, excavated starting in 1995 and published in 2010.
The first corpus of signs was published by Evans in 1909. The current corpus was published in 1996 as the Corpus Hieroglyphicarum Inscriptionum Cretae. It consists of:
The relation of the last two items with the script of the main corpus is uncertain; the Malia altar is listed as part of the Hieroglyphic corpus by most researchers.
Since the publication of the CHIC in 1996 refinements and changes have been proposed. The main issue is that a number of symbols found on sealstones, tending to be more image-based, were deemed as purely decorative and not included in the sign list. The concern is that this process may have resulted in actual signs being deprecated.
Some Cretan Hieroglyphic inscriptions were also found on the island of Samothrace in the northeastern Aegean.
Some scholars have suggested relations to Anatolian hieroglyphs:
New exemplars continue to be found. During recent excavation at the Neopalatial area of the Cult Centre of the City of Knossos a seal stone was found in a foundation deposit. The steatite seal had four inscribed faces and the deposit dated to Final Palatial Period into LM III B. The room where the deposit was found had a "religious sceptre" inscribed all over with Linear A.
At Zakros three sealings inscribed with Cretan hieroglyphs were found in the same deposit with a Linear A tablet and a Linear A inscribed roundel. The deposit was in a destruction layer dated between layers LM IA and LM IB.

Signs

Symbol inventories have been compiled by,, and.
The glyph inventory in CHIC includes 96 syllabograms representing sounds, ten of which double as logograms, representing words or portions of words.
There are also 23 logograms representing four levels of numerals, nine signs for numerical fractions, and two types of punctuation.
Many symbols have apparent Linear A counterparts, so that it is tempting to insert Linear B sound values. Moreover, there are multiple parallels from hieroglyphic inscriptions that occur also in Linear A and/or B in similar contexts
It has been suggested that several signs were influenced by Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Chronology

The development of hieroglyphs passed three important stages:
  • Archanes script ; this script was only described as a distinct stage in development of the Cretan hieroglyphic in the 1980s. Most of these seals contain a repetitive "Archanes formula" of 2–3 signs.
  • Hieroglyphic A
  • Hieroglyphic B. Only this latter version of the hieroglyphic includes signs that can possibly match ideograms known from Linear A.
The sequence and the geographical spread of Cretan hieroglyphs, Linear A, and Linear B, the five overlapping, but distinct, writing systems of Bronze Age Crete and the Greek mainland can be summarized as follows:
Writing systemGeographical areaTime span
Cretan HieroglyphicCrete c. 2100–1700 BC
Linear ACrete, Aegean islands, and Greek mainland c. 1800–1450 BC
Linear BCrete, and mainland c. 1450–1200 BC
Cypro-MinoanCyprusc. 1550–1050 BC
CypriotCyprusc. 11th–4th centuries BC

Fonts

The Aegean and Cretan Hieroglyphs fonts support Cretan hieroglyphs.

Works cited

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