Linear A Sign AB188

No standalone reading for AB188 is established.

“AB188” comes from GORILA, a scholarly catalogue used to list and compare Linear A signs. It names an entry, not a word or sound recovered from an inscription. As of 2026-10-08, the language of Linear A remains undeciphered.

Linear A appears by the end of the nineteenth century BCE, in the Middle Minoan IIA period on Bronze Age Crete. Some very early Aegean inscriptions are debated as Linear A or Cretan Hieroglyphic, another Minoan script. The two writing systems overlapped before Linear A became predominant.

What was Linear A used for?

It appears in accounts, offerings, and practical records.

Clay tablets, small clay discs, and seal impressions from palace archives record transactions. Inscriptions on stone offering tables, metal objects, and painted vessels appear mostly in ritual or practical settings. Most surviving examples come from Crete and nearby Aegean islands; a few reported examples farther away are disputed. Context still reveals places, people, goods, and transactions without translating the language.

Linear A shares some signs with later Linear B, which was used for an early form of Greek. That connection does not make AB188 readable as Greek. Many Linear A logograms—signs that stand for a whole word or item—do not appear in Linear B.

Why does 𐙓 show as a box?

This is font-dependent: your installed fonts determine whether 𐙓 appears.

If a font lacks Linear A coverage, it can show a box or fallback mark. Unicode stores the character; the font supplies its visible shape, so fonts can draw it differently.

The Unicode chart records 𐙓 as a component in four compound signs: 𐛥 A565 and 𐛦 A566, each with AB086; 𐜥 A645 with A337; and 𐜇 A604 with AB081. A touching or stacked compound can be encoded as one character; side-by-side unjoined parts stay separate. The encoding shows how text is stored, not AB188’s Bronze Age reading.