The Minoan Civilization of Crete, often hailed as Europe’s first literate society, left behind a strange writing system that continues to mystify modern scholars, remaining an unsolved enigma to this day.
Sometimes regarded as the first true European civilization, the Minoan culture rose to prominence on the Greek island of Crete between 3100 to 1100 BCE, during the Bronze Age. It spread and gained influence across parts of the Eastern Mediterranean before completely crumbling amid the late Bronze Age Collapse.
The society was a hotbed of creativity and human ingenuity. Minoan Crete is the setting for many ancient Greek legends, most notably the Labyrinth and the Minotaur, indicating it had a clear influence on Greek mythology and culture. It was also a pioneer of grand architecture, the most famous being the Palace of Knossos, as well as artworks and ornate objects of beauty.
Among these relics, archaeologists have found extensive evidence of a writing system composed of around 75 symbols each representing a syllable (as opposed to a letter) or a specific concept (known as an ideogram).
Based on the context of the inscriptions, it’s safe to assume that Linear A was used in at least two contexts: the sublime writings of religion and the hum-drum accounting of traded goods.
Linear A inscription on a clay tablet from Crete, probably 15th century BCE.
The writing system was given the catchy name Linear A, owing to its script being composed of lines and linear strokes. It shares some similarities with another writing system called “Linear B”, which has been partially deciphered and was used by the Mycenaeans in mainland Greece around a century later.
Linear B appears to show an early incarnation of Greek, but Linear A is considered to have little connection to the early Greek language that developed later on the mainland.
Linear A is found on a few hundred short inscriptions, most of which are incomplete, engraved upon clay seals and tablets. That’s a relatively small sample size for deciphering an entire writing system, especially one with a linguistic structure and features that remain beyond our current understanding.
To add to the mystery, it’s unclear where the writing system came from, although it’s evident the Minoans were in contact with the literate Egyptians and Mesopotamians, so perhaps they gleaned some inspiration from other “great” civilizations of the Bronze Age.
Recent research has started to shed more light on Linear A by highlighting that it perhaps isn’t as different from Linear B as previously thought. Dr Ester Salgarella from Cambridge University’s St John’s College constructed an extensive database that showed how many variants of signs in the Linear A script were carried onto Linear B, leading her to the conclusion that the “two scripts are actually two sides of the same coin.”
“There is a lot of confusion about Linear A. We don’t really know how many signs are to be taken as core signs, there’s even been a partial misclassification of signs in the past. This database tries to clear up the situation and give scholars a basis for advancement,” Dr Salgarella said in a 2021 statement.
“We don’t have a Rosetta Stone to crack the code of Linear A, and more linguistic analysis is required, but this structural analysis is a foundation stone.”
While we are still a long way from fully understanding the long-lost language, progress is still being made and new developments are constantly emerging.
Some promise is being invested in artificial intelligence (AI), which is capable of sifting through huge banks of text and finding new patterns that humans might have missed. AI-based machine learning techniques have already been used to gain more insights into Linear B, although its older Minoan counterpart remains as elusive as ever.
