Linear A Sign List

The Unicode block Linear A, U+10600 to U+1077F, holds 341 characters, all added in Unicode 7.0 in June 2014. Its chart runs them in five parts: simple signs, vase shapes, complex signs, complex signs with vase shapes, and fractions with a few additional signs. The main page, Linear A, Cypriot & Aegean Scripts, has the first, second and last of those: the syllable grid, the signs A301 to A371, the vessels and the fractions. This page is the two middle parts, the 132 complex signs from 𐚳 A501 at U+106B3 to 𐜶 A664 at U+10736, the completist's half of the script.

A complex sign is a ligature: two or three signs written as one, stacked or touching. The Unicode names list says what each one is made of, and this page follows those annotations. 𐚳 A501 is AB01 and AB02, the signs Linear B reads as da and ro; 𐚴 A502 adds a third sign, AB09 se, under AB01 and AB27 re. Ten of the signs carry no component list at all, only a cross-reference to the simple sign they resemble: 𐛀 A516 to AB28, 𐛅 A525 to AB38, 𐛍 A534 to AB51, 𐛙 A549 to A548, 𐛠 A556 to AB80, 𐛤 A564 to AB81, 𐜜 A628 to A304, 𐜢 A642 to A318, 𐜨 A649 to A401 and 𐜳 A661 to A414.

How GORILA numbers the Linear A signs

The numbers are those of Recueil des inscriptions en linéaire A by Louis Godart and Jean-Pierre Olivier, five volumes published in Paris between 1976 and 1985 and known everywhere as GORILA; the fifth volume holds the sign tables. AB numbers (AB01 to AB191) are signs Linear A shares with Linear B, A301 to A371 are simple signs found only in Linear A, A400 to A418 are vase shapes, A501 to A664 are the complex signs on this page, A701 to A732 are fractions and A800 to A807 are compound fractions. Unicode kept the numbers in the character names, so LINEAR A SIGN A580 is GORILA A 580.

The run from A501 to A664 has 164 numbers but only 132 characters, and the gaps are deliberate. The encoding proposal by Michael Everson and John Younger (N3973, December 2010) encoded only ligatures whose parts are stacked or touch; a GORILA ligature that is a plain side-by-side row of signs is written as that row. So A635 has no code point because it is 𐙚𐙇𐙛, A306 followed by the man-or-woman sign and A307, and A517 is AB28 followed by A574, 𐛭. The missing numbers are A507, A514, A517 to A519, A522, A533, A543, A544, A546, A558, A560 to A562, A567, A590, A593, A597, A599, A605, A607, A625, A630 to A633, A635, A636, A639, A641, A647 and A650; the proposal lists the sequence for each.

Families: what the complex signs are built on

Arranged by base sign, the list falls into families. The largest is olive oil: A302 𐙖 with a syllable sign on top gives sixteen ligatures, 𐜉 A608 to 𐜘 A623. Grain, AB120 𐙉, gives fourteen: seven with a syllable, 𐛬 A573 to 𐛲 A579, and seven with a fraction, 𐛳 A580 to 𐛹 A586, where A580 joins the fraction B for a third and A581 the fraction E for a quarter. Wine, AB131 𐙍, gives eight, 𐛻 A588 to 𐜂 A598, and the man-or-woman sign five, 𐛧 A568 to 𐛫 A572. The sixteen signs with vase shapes, 𐜧 A648 to 𐜶 A664, put a syllable or a fraction inside or beside one of the pots A400 to A418.

These are the signs of accounts. The proposal describes Linear A as some ninety syllable signs in regular use plus a host of logograms, many ligatured with syllabograms or fractions, about four fifths of them absent from Linear B. A complex sign normally behaves as an ideogram, a word for a thing counted, and most occur once in the surviving corpus. That is also why they resist reading: the proposal gives 𐛩 A570 as its own example, built from the man-or-woman sign and A313a 𐙣, and admits that nobody can say whether it is to be read man plus A313a or A313a plus man.

Typing Linear A and font support

No keyboard layout types Linear A, so the practical way is to copy: click any sign here and it is on your clipboard, with its own page open. For a sign you know by number, the code point is the way in: 𐚳 A501 is U+106B3 and the rest follow in GORILA order to A664 at U+10736; on Windows, type the hex in Word and press Alt+X, on Linux hold Ctrl+Shift+U and type it, on a Mac use the Unicode Hex Input keyboard. Every one of the 132 is a letter (category Lo), written left to right, with no combining behaviour of its own.

Few fonts cover the block. Noto Sans Linear A from Google covers all of it and is the font most pages, including this one, rely on; the free Aegean font by George Douros covers it too and is the one many epigraphers keep installed. Without one of them a reader sees empty boxes, and the complex signs, which are the densest shapes in the block, are the first to suffer at small sizes: set them a point or two larger than the running text.

Pitfalls when quoting the sign list

Keep GORILA numbers and code points apart: A580 is the sign, U+106F3 is its slot, and the two series do not run in step once the gaps begin. A corpus search for the grain sign AB120 will not find 𐛳 A580, because the ligature is a single character, not the sequence 𐙉𐝁; search for both forms, or use a database that knows the composition. SigLA, the palaeographical database of Linear A by Ester Salgarella and Simon Castellan, lists the composite signs with their parts and holds 827 documents, 373 of them from Hagia Triada; John Younger's Linear A Texts in Phonetic Transcription is the other standard reference.

Epigraphic conventions still apply in plain text. A doubtful reading takes U+0323, the combining dot below, after the sign, so 𐛩̣ is A570 read with reservation; lost or illegible text goes in square brackets, which GORILA uses but the glyphs never show. And the ligatures that Unicode did not encode are not missing from your font: write A635 as its three parts and a font may draw them as one.