Linear A

Linear A is a writing system that was used by the Minoans of Crete from 1800 BC to 1450 BC. Linear A was the primary script used in palace and religious writings of the Minoan civilization. It evolved into Linear B, which was used by the Mycenaeans to write an early form of Greek. It was discovered by the archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans in 1900. No texts in Linear A have yet been deciphered. Evans named the script "Linear" because its characters consisted simply of lines inscribed in clay, in contrast to the more pictographic characters in Cretan hieroglyphs – likewise undeciphered – that were used during the same period.
Linear A belongs to a group of scripts that evolved independently of the Egyptian and Mesopotamian systems. During the second millennium BC, there were four major branches: Linear A, Linear B, Cypro-Minoan, and Cretan hieroglyphic. In the 1950s, Linear B was deciphered and found to have an underlying language of Mycenaean Greek. Linear A shares many glyphs and alloglyphs with Linear B, and the syllabic glyphs are thought to notate similar syllabic values, but none of the proposed readings lead to a language that scholars can understand.

Script

Linear A consists of over 300 signs including regional variants and ones which occur only once. Among these, a core group of 90 occur with some frequency throughout the script's geographic and chronological extent.
As a logosyllabic writing system, Linear A includes signs which stand for syllables as well as others standing for words or concepts. Linear A's signs could be combined via ligature to form complex signs. Complex signs usually behave as ideograms and most are hapax legomena, meaning that they occur only once in the surviving corpus. Linear A signs are divided into four categories:

syllabic signs
ligatures and composite signs
ideograms
numerals and metrical signs

Linear A was usually written left-to-right, but a handful of documents were written right-to-left or boustrophedon.

Signary

Special signs

Furthermore, the following ‘supplementary’ syllabograms for more complex syllables can be identified :

Ideograms

The following list contains some frequent ideograms/logograms whose meaning is known and uncontroversial and almost all of which are preserved in Linear B. The meaning of many others is debated. Note that some of the ideograms are also used as syllabograms; in such cases, the sound value is indicated in the table before the Bennett number.

Numerals

These numerals follow a decimal system: units are represented by vertical dashes, tens by horizontal dashes, hundreds by circles, and thousands by circles with rays. There are special symbols to indicate fractions and weights. Specific signs that coincide with numerals are regarded as fractions; these sign combinations are known as klasmatograms.
Integers can be read and the operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division are quite straightforward, similarly to Roman numerals.

1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9

10	20	30	40	50	60	70	80	90

100	200	300	400	500	600	700	800	900

Fractions

There is a lack of scholarly agreement about signs, generally called klasmatograms, for Linear A fractions. In 2021 Corazza et al. proposed the following values, most of which had been previously suggested:

Symbol	Glyph	Value
J
E
B
D
F
K
H		?
L²
A		?
L³
L⁴
L⁶
W		= BB?
X		= AA?
Y		?
Ω		?

Other fractions are composed by addition: the common JE and DD are and , BB =, EF =, etc.. L, Y, and Ω are hapax legomena and it has been proposed that glyph L is spurious.
Several of these values are supported by Linear B. Although Linear B used a different numbering system, several of the Linear A fractions were adopted as fractional units of measurement. For example, Linear B DD and are and of a lana, while K is of the main unit for dry weight.

Corpus

Linear A has been found chiefly on Crete, but also at other sites in Greece, as well as Turkey and Israel. The extant corpus, comprising some 1,427 specimens totals 7,362 to 7,396 signs. Linear A has been written on various media, such as stone offering tables and vessels, gold and silver hairpins, roundels, and ceramics. The earliest inscriptions of Linear A come from Phaistos, in a layer dated at the end of the Middle Minoan II period: that is, no later than c. 1700 BC. Linear A inscriptions have been found throughout the island of Crete and also on some Aegean islands, in mainland Greece in Laconia, on the west coast of Asia Minor, and in the Levant.
The first comprehensive compendium of Linear A inscriptions was produced by Louis Godart and Jean-Pierre Olivier in multiple volumes between 1976 and 1985. In 2011 work began on a supplement to that compendium. In 2020 a project was begun, called , to put all the known Linear A inscriptions online at a single site.

Tablets

Almost all Linear A tablets, most in a fragmentary condition, have been found on the island of Crete, dated to the Neopalatial Period. At that time Crete was divided by mountains and other geographic features into a number of polities, each with its own urban center. These tablets have been found at Hagia Triada, Petras, Phaistos, Knossos, Archanes, Myrtos Pyrgos, Palaikastro, Zakros, Tylissos, Malia, Gournia, and Khania. One Linear A tablet was found on Kea in the Cyclades. Three tablet fragments were found on the island of Santorini. The handful of known Cretan Hieroglyphs tablets were also found on Crete at Malia and Kato Symi.

Sealed documents

Seals and clay sealings served the same role of inventory control and ownership as in the ancient Near East and Egypt. Large numbers of sealings have been found, primarily on Crete and in the Late Minoan IB period. The primary sources of sealed documents come from Haghia Triada, Zakros, Khania, Knossos, Phaistos, Malia, and Tylissos. It is not clear what was commonly used to impress the sealing as only a few Linear A inscribed "seal stones" have been found. In other regions cylinder seals and stamp seals fulfilled this role.
Sealed documents are divided by archaeologists into four classes:

Roundels – disks of clay with sealing on the edges
Hanging nodules – sealed lumps of clay originally attached to string
Parcel nodules – lumps of clay with sealing on back
Noduli – clay lumps like hanging nodules but not formerly string attached
Libation tables

A group of Minoan finds, usually from sanctuaries, have traditionally been called libation tables. They come in full sized and miniature versions, usually of stone. Because of the findspots, at cultic sites like Mount Juktas, they are usually assumed to be religious in nature though that is not certain. So far about 1000 libation tables have been recovered at 27 different sites on Crete, of which 41 have Linear A inscriptions. These inscriptions follow a standardized "libation formula", a formula also found on a few other objects, primarily vessels.
The "libation formula" has been much studied. A similar construct in Cretan Hieroglyphs, the "Archanes Formula", is the main proposed link to Linear A.

Chronology

The earliest attestation of Linear A begins around 1800 BC during the Protopalatial period. It became prominent around 1625 BC and went out of use around 1450 BC during the Neopalatial period. It was contemporary with and possibly derived from Cretan hieroglyphs, and may be an ancestor of Linear B. The Cypro-Minoan syllabary, used between Cyprus and its trading partners around the Mediterranean, was also in use during this period. The sequence and the geographical spread of Cretan hieroglyphs, Linear A, and Linear B, the three overlapping but distinct writing systems on Bronze Age Crete and the Greek mainland, can be summarized as follows:

Writing system	Geographical area	Time span
Cretan Hieroglyphic	Crete, Samothrace
Linear A	Crete, Aegean islands, and Greek mainland
Cypro-Minoan	Cyprus and trading partners, Ugarit
Linear B	Crete, and mainland

Decipherment

Linear A has not been fully deciphered. However, researchers are reasonably confident in the approximate sound values of most syllabic signs and are able to make inferences about the meanings of some texts.

Challenges to decipherment

One major barrier to its decipherment is the limited surviving corpus. Only around 1400 Linear A inscriptions survive, in contrast to the 6000 available for Linear B. As a result, researchers are stuck with limited sample sizes, making it difficult to reliably detect patterns. Similarly, Linear A inscriptions are often fragmentary, damaged, or otherwise hard to read. It can be difficult to individuate particular signs and to distinguish separate signs from handwriting variants. Finally, Linear A inscriptions tend to be brief and repetitive. Rather than complete sentences, many are lists where each entry consists of a toponym or personal name followed by a logogram and then a numeral. Thus, the surviving corpus contains few spelled-out words and limited evidence of the grammatical structure.
A second barrier is the scarcity of external evidence. No bilingual inscriptions have been found, preventing the script from being deciphered in the manner that Egyptian hieroglyphs were deciphered using the Rosetta Stone. The underlying language of Linear A has not been determined, and it is not clear that the same language was used for its entire period of use. The grammatical evidence that can be gleaned from the surviving corpus suggests that it was not a close relative of any known language.