Linear A, Cypriot & Aegean Scripts

Linear A is the writing of the Minoan palaces of Crete, in use from about 1800 to 1450 BC. Arthur Evans, who dug Knossos, named it 'linear' because its signs are plain lines scratched into wet clay, unlike the picture-like Cretan hieroglyphs that came before it. About 1,400 inscriptions survive with some 7,400 signs between them: clay tablets, sealings, and stone libation tables with a repeated dedication formula. Hagia Triada in the south of the island gives half the whole corpus, including 147 tablets; Zakros, Khania, Phaistos and Knossos give most of the rest. It usually runs left to right.

Nobody can read it. The tablets are accounts, so the numbers are understood (a decimal system of strokes, dashes and circles, and the fractions in the grid above), and a few words recur in the right places: 𐙂𐘁 ku-ro stands at the foot of lists where a total belongs, 𐘂𐘚𐘄 pa-i-to matches Phaistos, and 𐘇𐘞𐘞𐘴𐘋 (j)a-sa-sa-ra-me is the heart of the libation formula. Those readings borrow sound values from Linear B, which took most of its signs from Linear A a few centuries later to write Greek. Applying them produces words, but in a language that is not Greek and that no one has matched to a known family, which is why claimed decipherments (Luwian, Semitic, Etruscan-like, and more) have all failed to convince.

The grid uses the standard sign list of Godart and Olivier: AB numbers mark the roughly 90 signs shared with Linear B, so 𐘀 is AB01 da and 𐘁 AB02 ro; signs numbered A301 and up exist only in Linear A; A400 to A418 are vessels; A701 to A732 are fractions. Some shared signs are ideograms rather than syllables: 𐙇 man or woman, 𐙈 talent (a weight), 𐙉 grain, 𐙋 olives, 𐙍 wine. Unicode added the whole block of 341 characters in version 7.0 (2014). The Mycenaean script that grew out of it has its own page, Linear B Syllabary & Ideograms, together with the Aegean numbers.

The Cypriot syllabary: a vowel grid you can actually read

The Cypriot syllabary wrote Greek on Cyprus from about the 11th to the 4th century BC, long after the rest of the Greek world had switched to the alphabet. It descends from Cypro-Minoan and, through it, from Linear A, but unlike them it was deciphered: in the 1870s George Smith and others cracked it with the help of a Phoenician and Cypriot bilingual from Idalion, and the bronze Idalion Tablet of about 480 to 470 BC, a contract between the city's king and a physician who treated the wounded of a Persian siege, confirmed the readings. Most texts are in the Arcadocypriot dialect of Greek; a few, such as the Amathus bilingual, are in Eteocypriot, the island's unknown older language.

Each sign is one open syllable, hence the grid: 𐠀𐠁𐠂𐠃𐠄 are the bare vowels, then one row per consonant. The script does not tell k from g or kh, p from b or ph, or t from d or th, but it does keep l and r apart, which Linear B could not. A final consonant is written with a silent e-sign, so basileus, 'king', is 𐠞𐠪𐠐𐠄𐠩 pa-si-le-u-se and anthropos, 'human', is 𐠀𐠰𐠦𐠡𐠩 a-to-ro-po-se. Most inscriptions run right to left; the Paphian variety in the south-west ran left to right. Unicode encoded its 55 signs in version 4.0 (2003), and they display left to right there.

The syllabary faded in the 4th century BC as kings such as Evagoras of Salamis promoted the Greek alphabet, the same letters you will find under Greek Letters. For the island's later scripts and symbols see the Cyprus collection.

Cypro-Minoan: the Bronze Age script of Cyprus

Cypro-Minoan is the writing of Late Bronze Age Cyprus, in use from about 1550 to 1050 BC. Arthur Evans named it in 1909 because its signs resemble Linear A, from which it is thought to derive. About 250 inscribed objects are known, some 4,000 signs in all: clay tablets, more than 90 small clay balls carrying three to five signs each, cylinders, and marks on pots and on copper ingots, including ingots from the Cape Gelidonya shipwreck. The earliest substantial text is a tablet from Enkomi of about 1500 BC; the longest is a clay cylinder from the same site, with 217 signs, from the 14th century BC. Pieces have turned up at Ugarit in Syria, at Tiryns in Greece and as far as Sicily.

It is undeciphered and the language behind it is unknown. The signs come in varieties that Émilia Masson and Jean-Pierre Olivier labelled CM1, CM2 and CM3, once read as stages and now often treated as one script. Unicode encoded it last of the four, in version 14.0 (September 2021): 97 signs numbered CM001 to CM114, beginning 𒾐𒾑𒾒𒾓𒾔𒾕, and two marks, 𒿱𒿲, that Unicode classes as punctuation. The text runs left to right.

The Phaistos Disc: 45 stamped pictures

The Phaistos Disc is a fired clay disc about 16 cm across, found on 3 July 1908 by the Italian archaeologist Luigi Pernier in the Minoan palace of Phaistos, in southern Crete; it is on show in the Heraklion Archaeological Museum. Both faces carry a spiral of signs pressed into the clay with individual stamps, one stamp per sign, which makes it the earliest known use of movable type. There are 45 different signs and 241 or 242 impressions in all (one damaged spot is counted differently), divided by incised lines into 61 groups that are probably words. It is usually dated to the 17th or 16th century BC, and most scholars read it from the rim inward.

The signs are pictures: 𐇐𐇑𐇒𐇓𐇔𐇕 a walking man, a plumed head, a tattooed head, a captive, a child, a woman; weapons and tools; a ship, 𐇬𐇭𐇮𐇯𐇰𐇱 a cat, a ram, an eagle, a dove, a tunny and a bee; 𐇲𐇳𐇴𐇵𐇶 plants and flowers. Their names are the descriptions Arthur Evans gave them and say nothing about their sound or meaning. The plumed head 𐇑 is the most frequent sign and 𐇑𐇛 the most frequent pair. The disc has never been deciphered: with one short text and no bilingual, every published reading, and there are dozens, rests on assumptions that cannot be tested, and a few scholars have even doubted the disc is genuine, though the museum and most archaeologists accept it.

Unicode encoded the 45 signs plus the combining oblique stroke 𐇽 in version 5.1 (2008). The stroke is the small slash the disc adds under the last sign of some groups; in text it attaches to the sign before it. Because the whole set is in Unicode, the disc's spiral is a favourite for pendants, rings and tattoos, and those searches are where most visitors to this page come from.

How to type and display Aegean scripts

Tap any sign above to copy it. All four scripts are ordinary text, but they sit in the Supplementary Multilingual Plane (Linear A U+10600 to U+1077F, Cypriot U+10800 to U+1083F, Phaistos Disc U+101D0 to U+101FF, Cypro-Minoan U+12F90 to U+12FFF), and the fonts that ship with phones and most computers do not include them, so expect empty boxes until you install one. Google's free Noto fonts cover three: Noto Sans Linear A, Noto Sans Cypriot and Noto Sans Cypro Minoan. On Windows, Segoe UI Historic includes the Cypriot syllabary. For the Phaistos Disc, and for all four scripts in one file, George Douros's free Aegean font is the usual choice. In Word, type the code and press Alt+X: 10600 then Alt+X gives 𐘀.

Two cautions. Sound values on this page are secure for the Cypriot syllabary only; for Linear A they are Linear B values applied by resemblance, and Cypro-Minoan and the Phaistos Disc have none, so a 'translator' into any of these three can only transliterate guesses. And these are not the Greek alphabet: a Cypriot inscription in Greek looks nothing like Greek Letters, and Minoan is not Greek at all. Neighbours worth a look: Linear B Syllabary & Ideograms for the deciphered Mycenaean script, Cuneiform Symbols and Egyptian Hieroglyphs for the writing the Minoans traded alongside, and Anatolian Scripts for the hieroglyphs and alphabets across the water in Turkey.