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Linear A: The Problems of Decipherment
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Featured March 15 , 2006
Why Linear A hasn't yet been translated
At some point after 2000 BC writing reached Crete. Where it came from, whether from Egypt or Mesopotamia, isn't known. But like most other developments that reached the island, it succeeded in going its own way. In 1900 Arthur Evans found two types of scripts on clay tablets in Crete, which he called Linear A and Linear B. Linear A was the older, c 1700 - 1550 BCE, and only about 300 tablets have been found. Linear B, used approximately 1500 - 1200 BCE was found on about 3,000 tablets at Knossos, and later on over 1,000 more at Pylos, the Mycenaean mainland palace. Whereas Linear B was deciphered back in the 50s by Michael Ventris and John Chadwick, attempts by scholars to decode the Linear A script have so far been totally blocked.
Much of the difficulty is that unlike the tablets written in Linear B, some of which were fairly lengthy, the Linear A inscriptions found to date are (so far as I am aware) at most a few lines long... no literature, correspondence or even complete inscriptions, hence the use of a very limited number of words. And such short fragments of text simply cannot be understood in a meaningful way. The second huge problem is that the whole issue of decipherment is so closely related to that of language that until it can be determined what the underlying aboriginal Minoan language was, the decipherment of Linear A remains something of a "holy grail"! Where do you start when deciphering a script in an unknown language? If, when the symbols are deciphered they produce words that bear no relation to a known language, is it because the deciphering is incorrect, or is it in fact an unknown language? Unless you have something convenient to check your deciphering against... like the Rosetta Stone... you can go round and round in circles. Which is pretty much what is happening. Because it's now generally accepted that Linear B, which seems to have been adapted from Linear A, was used to write an archaic form of Greek, a lot of decipherment attempts on Linear A itself have started from the not-entirely-illogical premise that Linear A was used to write an archaic Greek too. However!... Linear B was, as a writing system, designed for a non-Greek language. Features such as consonant clusters, terminal -s, and distinctions between r and l , g and k, and p and b, all of which occur in Greek, seem to have been missing from the language that Linear A was originally designed for. It's almost as if the Mycenaean writers of Linear B took an existing script (Linear A) which had been devised for a totally different language and forced it to fit their own language... It's all a bit of a puzzle isn't it? Although the Mycenaeans evidently spoke some archaic form of Greek and used Linear B to write it, it's almost certain the Minoan language was non-Greek. Homer mentions the "Eteocretans" (ie "real Cretans", presumably as opposed to the later Doric inhabitants) as having their own language. I don't know how seriously the linguists take the Homer reference, but like a lot of things in Homer it probably has a grain of truth. Homer's say-so probably wouldn't account for a lot on its own, except that all other evidence points towards the Cretan language being non-Greek as well, and archaeology does back up the co-existence of Eteocretan and Dorian inhabitants in the post-palace period. Attempts have been made to relate the Minoan language to Anatolian, Indo-European, Hamito-Semitic and even proto-Slavic languages but none of the attempts have been conclusive. For example, Cyrus Gordon (Ugarit and Minoan Crete: The bearing of their texts on the Origins of Western Culture, 1966) claimed that the Minoan language belonged to the North West Semitic group of languages, but that idea was dismissed by other scholars. Similarly, the Linear A script has been compared to every known contemporary-ish script for similarities. Leonard Palmer's Mycenaeans and Minoans claims some similarity with Luvian or Hittite cuneiform, and that Minoan belonged to the Anatolian group of Indo-European languages. But as he wrote this in the 1950's and it still hasn't been proved or disproved it remains just one argument among many! I imagine there's a good chance though that if the Minoans adopted the art of writing from somewhere like Mesopotamia or Egypt, there might be some similarity in the characters used in the script, though that still doesn't necessarily prove any language similarities (ie you could write a sentence in English using the Russian alphabet but it isn't Russian....) The situation at the moment is that there continue to be numerous publicised and non-publicised attempts at deciphering Linear A, but its generally accepted that no one has the found the magic key just yet. Main sources: Cyrus Gordon, Ugarit and Minoan Crete: The bearing of their texts on the Origins of Western Culture, 1966 Leonard Palmer, Mycenaeans and Minoans, 1961 Andrew Robinson, Lost Languages, 2002 |
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