Cretan Hieroglyphic and Linear A
composition: secure
witness: Linear A tablets, roundels, and sealings from Cretan and Aegean administrative and ritual sites; Cretan Hieroglyphic chiefly on seals
Minoan Crete developed two related but distinct scripts, Cretan Hieroglyphic and Linear A, to record palace and sanctuary transactions in numbers, commodities, and personal or divine names whose underlying language, or languages, still cannot be securely identified.
- two related, undeciphered Minoan administrative scripts: Cretan Hieroglyphic and Linear A
- recorded numbers, commodities, and names on tablets, roundels, sealings, and ritual objects
- the underlying language or languages, conventionally called Minoan, are not securely identified
- Linear A's signs were later adapted, with a change of language, into Linear B for Greek
Two related administrative scripts used in Bronze Age Crete and parts of the wider Aegean: Cretan Hieroglyphic, attested mainly on seals and a smaller number of clay documents from around the 20th to 17th centuries BC, and Linear A, which developed from or alongside it and became the dominant administrative script of the Minoan palaces from roughly the 18th to 15th centuries BC, recorded on clay tablets, roundels, and sealings, and also inscribed on stone offering tables and metal objects in ritual contexts. Numbers, commodity signs, and document formats can be analyzed in detail, and many individual signs recur predictably enough to be transliterated, but neither script has been deciphered, and the language or languages they record, often called Minoan for convenience, are not securely identified. Both scripts went out of use before Linear B, adapted from Linear A to write Greek, replaced them after the Mycenaean takeover of Crete.
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