Parrot Time Magazine

The Thinking of Speaking
Issue #2 March / April 2013
Artifacts
Linear A & Linear B

Linear A & Linear B

Lost Minoan

Lost Minoan

by Lucy Martin
March / April 2013 |  asd

On Crete, a southern island of Greece, is Knossos, one of the most important Palaces of Minoan civilization. It is important not only in its historical features, but also in its mythological background, as well as being the location of some fascinating linguistic artifacts, some of which remain a mystery even today.

Ancient Greece
Ancient Greece, with Crete in the south

In ancient times, Knossos was the seat of the legendary King Minos. It lies 5 kilometers southeast of Heraklion, in the valley of the river Kairatos, which runs through Knossos before spilling into the Minoan harbor, Katsabas. During Minoan times, the river flowed year round bringing life to the surrounding hills, which were covered in oak and cypress trees.

The first palace was built and occupied, along with other houses and structures, between the 19th and 17th centuries BC, although the very first settlement in the Knossos area was established circa 7000 BC, during the Neolithic Period. It was the economic, social and political development of the settlement which eventually led to the construction of the Palace of Knossos.

After the first Palace was destroyed circa 1700 BC, it was rebuilt, only to be destroyed again by fire in 1350 BC. The area around the Palace was converted into a sacred grove for the goddess Rhea, and never inhabited again. It was a monumental symbol of the Minoan civilization, not only because of its size, but also its use of materials, design, and advanced building techniques.

Knossos became settled after 1450 BC by Mycenaeans from the Greek Mainland. It again flourished during the Hellenistic period and in 67 BC, it was captured by the Roman Quintus Caecilius Metelus Creticus.

Palace ruins at Knossos
Palace ruins at Knossos

 Minos Kalokairinos

In 1878, the first large-scale excavation of Knossos was begun by a wealthy Cretan merchant and antiquarian named Minos Kalokairinos.

He conducted the first excavations at Kephala Hill, which led to the discovery of part of the storage rooms in the west wing and a section of the west facade, as well as many large pithoi (storage pots).

Crete was still under Turkish occupation at the time, however, and the local authorities prevented any further digging by Kalokairinos, for they feared that the finds would be expropriated by the Turks and taken to Istanbul.

 Sir Arthur Evans

Sir Arthur Evans

In 1894, Kalokairinos showed his finds to Arthur Evans, who had come to the island in search of information about the strange inscriptions he had seen on some tablets in Oxford and Athens. Evans had been busy deciphering script on seal stones on Crete, and when the island was declared an independent state in 1900, he purchased the site of Knossos and began his excavations of the palace ruins. It was then that they were named "Minoan" by Evans, after the legendary king of Crete.

Mythology and the Ancient Minoans

Crete is the setting for many stories in Greek mythology, though whether these were created by the Minoans themselves or by the Greeks later, it is hard to tell. It was these myths that brought Evans to Knossos, and fueled his eagerness to uncover the history.

King Minos

Fanciful image of King Minos
Fanciful image of
King Minos

In the myths, Minos was a son of the god Zeus and a mortal woman, Europa (Zeus fathered many children with mortals). Minos married Pasiphae, herself the daughter of the Greek sun god Helios. In reality, "Minos" may have been a title or the name a of a dynasty of rulers.

The Minotaur

One of the most famous stories involves a terrible beast, with the body of a man and the head of a bull, called the Minotaur. According to legend, King Minos refused to sacrifice a certain bull. Poseidon, god of the sea, punished him by making his wife Pasiphae fall in love with the animal, and she eventually gave birth to the man-eating monster.

Daedalus, an Athenian craftsman, designed for King Minos the labyrinth, a large underground maze, in which the king imprisoned the Minotaur. Anyone in the labyrinth could not escape it or the Minotaur.

After Minos' son Androgeus was killed out of jealousy by the King of Athens when he won many events in the Athenian Olympics, Minos deployed the mighty Cretan fleet to attack Athens. Rather than destroying Athens once it was captured it, however, Minos decreed that every nine years, Athens was to send seven young men and seven virgin women, whom Minos would then throw them into a labyrinth where they were sacrificed to the Minotaur.

Theseus, the son of the Athenian King, volunteered to be one of the seven sacrificed men, intending to kill the Minotaur and end the suffering of Athens. If he succeeded in his mission, he told his father he would return with the sails of his ship white instead of the normal black.

Theseus and the Minotaur

Upon arriving at the palace, Theseus fell in love with Minos' daughter, Ariadne. Daedalus had told only Ariadne the secret of the labyrinth, and she in turn helped Theseus by giving him a thread to use as a guide back out of labyrinth. Theseus entered the labyrinth, letting the thread unwind behind him. He killed the Minotaur and found his way back out.

Tragically, in his excitement, Theseus forgot to change the sails to white, and when his father saw the sails, he believed Theseus to be dead. Overcome by grief, he threw himself into the sea and died.

The Fall of Icarus

The events surrounding this myth lead to another, dealing with Daedalus. One story says that King Minos learned that Daedalus had built a wooden cow so that his wife, Pasiphae, could near the white bull she loved safely, and had Daedalus imprisoned, along with this son, Icarus. Another story says that Minos imprisoned Daedalus and Icarus in the labyrinth out of rage when Theseus escaped.

Pasiphae helped both the craftsman and son to escape, and Daedalus made them a pair of wax wings so they could fly from Crete and not be recaptured. However, tragedy struck again, and Icarus didn't heed his father's advice about the wings. He flew to high, and the sun melted the wings, causing Icarus to fall to his death. Daedalus managed to escape to Sicily.

Evans uncovered 3,000 clay tablets during excavations and he worked to transcribe them. From the transcriptions, it became clear that the tablets contained more than one script.

Evans spent the rest of his life trying to decipher the inscriptions, but with only limited success. He realized that the inscriptions represented three different writing systems: a "hieroglyphic' script", Linear A, and Linear B. The hieroglyphic script appeared only on seal stones and has still not been deciphered. Linear A is also, as yet, undeciphered, but it is thought to have evolved from the hieroglyphic script. Linear B probably evolved from Linear A, though the relationship between those two scripts remains unclear.

 Linear B

Evans figured out quite a bit about Linear B, including that it contained decimal numerals, punctuation and symbols for man and woman and certain animals. Evans also suggested that the language used inflection. He decided, perhaps more because of his love of the Minoan history than for any scientific examination, that these Cretan scripts must belong to the Minoan culture, and therefore Linear B could not be Greek.

Evans spent the rest of his life trying to decipher the inscriptions, but with only limited success. He realized that the inscriptions represented three different writing systems: a "hieroglyphic script", Linear A, and Linear B.

Among the many scholars that attempted to decode Linear B, it was general agreed that the writing direction of Linear B was from left to right, and that most of the clay tablets were inventory data, which concurred with Evans' own determining of the numerals. The large number of distinct characters that were identified, around 90, indicated a syllabary writing system. While some scholars suspected it was perhaps related to Greek or a Cypriot language, most assumed Linear B was an unknown Cretan language.

Shortly after Evans' death in 1941, an American archaeologist named Alice Kober noted that certain words in the Linear B inscriptions had changing word endings, similar in manner to the declensions of Latin or Greek. This provided a clue to another scholar of Linear B, Michael Ventris.

Ventris had encountered Evans in 1936 at an exhibition of Greek and Minoan treasures at the Royal Academy in London. While Ventris was only 14 years old at the time, this touched off what became a lifelong obsession with Linear B.

As an adult, Ventris used Kober's clue to construct a series of grids, associating the symbols on the tablets with consonants and vowels. While he still could not determine which consonants and vowels they were, he learned enough the underlying structure of the language to begin guessing.

Pylos Linear B tablet
Pylos Linear B tablet, similar to those found at Knossos

Other Linear B tablets had been discovered on the Greek mainland, and in comparison to those found at Knossos, there was reason to believe that some of the chains of symbols Ventris he had found on the Cretan tablets were names. Noting that certain names appeared only in the Cretan texts, he made an imaginative guess that those names applied to cities on the island. He then got lucky when one of the sets could only be one particular town, and no other.

This insight proved to be correct. This allowed him to fill in the sounds of some of the signs, and he was able to unlock much of the text. It was finally determined that the underlying language of Linear B was in fact very old Greek, dating back some 500 years before Homer. This overruled Evans' original theories of Minoan history and established that Cretan civilization, at least in the later periods of the Linear B tablets, had been part of Mycenaean Greece. Linear B was completely deciphered in 1952.

 Hieroglyphics

A sample of Egyptian hieroglyphics
A sample of Egyptian hieroglyphics

Hieroglyphics are a form of writing in which the letters/words are more picture-like, i.e. three waving lines running parallel to each other might denote "river". The hieroglyphics that were found at Knossos are samples of very old Cretan writing. This writing appeared mainly on clay seal stones. They depict physical objects to most probably record the quantities of these objects they protected.

The normal progression of a hieroglyphic system is that is becomes stylized and linear. For example, quantities would come to be represented by numerals, instead of multiple impressions of the same sign. The pictures would become simplified, using lines to represent what were the more elaborate parts of the picture. Thus the term "linear" is used to describe the writing systems that evolved out of the hieroglyphics.

 Linear A

Linear A is assumed to have been the evolution of the hieroglyphics at Knossos, and Linear B to be the progression from Linear A into the very ancient Greek. This assumption, however, has not been proven, or enabled either the hieroglyphics or Linear A to be deciphered.

It is a syllabic (composed of signs to represent sounds, instead of letter groups forming sounds) script written from left to right, as is Linear B. The approximate phonetic values of many syllabic signs which are used in Linear A are also known from Linear B, but the language written in Linear A remains unknown and will probably remain obscure, since it doesn't seem to relate to any other surviving language in Europe or Western Asia.

Tablet of Linear A
Tablet of Linear A

The most straight forward approach to deciphering Linear A may be to assume that the values of Linear A approximately match the values given to the fully transliterated Linear B script, and while this point of view has been of great interest to archaeologists, there is currently no linguistic grounds for accepting it. For the 213 Linear A signs, the majority have no link with any Linear B sign, and most of the similar signs have a small difference, which suggests a phonetic change.

 Theories

Many scholars have put forth their own possible decipherments of Linear over the decades, and while many have strong merits, they also contain limitations. No one has been able to definitively prove what Linear A, or even what it might be related to.

 Semitic Origin

Dr. Cyrus H. Gordon was an American scholar of Near Eastern cultures and ancient languages who also took an interest in decoding Linear A. Some of his own work included drawing connections between the Greek and Hebrew civilizations. Using this work, his knowledge of semitic languages, and even cryptology (which he did while serving in the U.S. Army in WWII), Dr. Gordon suggested that Linea A was a semitic language, which the Bible called Hamitic, and his first article suggesting this was published in 1957. However, there is little evidence to support this connection, and while most scripts used to represent Semitic languages have few vowels, Linear A has many.

 Luwian

Luwian is an extinct language of the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European language family. It is closely related to Hittite and was among the languages spoken by people in Arzawa, later known as Lydia, in what is now Turkey.

During the 1960s, a theory evolved that Linear A could be an Anatolian language, close to Luwian, based upon the phonetic values of Linear B. This theory, however, lost many supporters during the second half of the 20th century due to the growth of archaeological and linguistic data about the Anatolian languages and peoples.

In 1997, Gareth Alun Owens, a British-Greek academic, published a collection of essays titled "Kritika Daidalika", which support the view that Linear A might represent an archaic relative of Luwian. He based this assertion on the possible Indo-European but non-Greek roots of a small number of words that were readable read by using the known Linear B or Cypriot sound values of certain Linear A signs.

During the 1960s, a theory evolved that Linear A could be an Anatolian language, close to Luwian, based upon the phonetic values of Linear B.

Owens postulated that the phonetic values of 90% of the Linear A characters correspond to those of Linear B figures of similar appearance. Ten characters do not match, and their meaning can only be speculated upon. Using his system of correspondences, Owens uncovered several place names which appear in the Linear B tablets and figure prominently in the archaeological history of Crete. He also put forth that he had found evidence of grammatical gender for nouns, as well as vocabulary and noun and verb endings that to indicated the basic "Minoan" language of the Linear A tablets to be an Indo-European language of the Satem branch.

The drawbacks to this theory include that there is no remarkable resemblance between Minoan and Hitto-Luwian morphology, no existing theories support the migration of the Hitto-Luwian peoples to Crete, and the obvious anthropological differences between Hitto-Luwians and the Minoans, as mentioned before.

 Phoenician

Phoenician is a semitic language originally spoken in what is now known as Lebanon, parts of Syria, and parts of the Mediterranean coast.

Working from Gordon's theories that Linear A might be a Semitic language, scholar Jan Best published an article entitled "The First Inscription in Punic — Vowel Differences in Linear A and B" in 1991. In it, Best claimed to demonstrate how and why Linear A notates an archaic form of Phoenician. However, for many of the same reasons, his theory drew widespread criticism. While there are a few terms the may be of Semitic origin, there simply isn't enough evidence to make the link.

 Indo-Iranian

Hubert La Marle, a French researcher in linguistics and epigraphy, started studying Linear in 1989, and developed his own theory that it may belong to the Indo-Iranian family of languages. This theory is based largely on the frequencies of each sign in certain positions. He also compares Linear A to other ancient scripts around the eastern Mediterranean. He suggests that these two methods provide many conclusions about the phonetic nature of the syllabic signs for a most of the signs, and that aspects of Linear A closely resemble ancient Indo-Iranian.

Linear A. Copy of inscriptions round the inner surface of cup
Linear A. Copy of inscriptions round the inner surface of cup

Furthermore, La Marle's study includes a coherent presentation of the morphology of the language. It avoids the complete identification of phonetic values between Linear A and B.

However, his critics have pointed out a few problems with this theory. First, it uses frequencies of signs, rather than their structure within Linear A, to make a translation. He also assigns phonetic values to the signs based on superficial resemblances to signs in other scripts, as opposed to direct matches. While differences in signs can occur over time, it is not a good basis for determining connections. Some scholars also contend that the work is biased, because he attempts to translate the words into a language he has chosen, rather then matching a language to the translation.

 Conclusion

Knossos north entrance rebuilt
Knossos north entrance rebuilt

Work continues on the decipherment of Linear A texts, and there may yet be a discovery in the future that helps clarify the meaning of the language. It may as yet be somehow connected to Linear B, or connected to a currently existing language, as in the theories above. It is also possible, however, that the language was separated long ago from any language we know and a connection will never be made.

Despite that, much has been learned about the Minoan civilization through the study of the artifacts inscribed in Linear A. Linear B has also been instrumental in explaining the historical connection between the Minoans and Greeks. Both scripts have also been used in analyzing other linguistic artifacts, and it as yet possible that someone might one day find another "Rosetta Stone" to help solve the mystery.

Linear A & B - Lost Minoan
Writer: Lucy Martin
Images:
AlexKitch: Egyptian hieroglyphics
Corvax: Knossos North Entrance
Japo: Palace ruins at Knossos
koikichi: top (Crete bay)
Lapplaender: People on central courtyard
Petey: Map of Crete, Arthur Evans, King Minos, Theseus Minotaur Mosaic, Linear B, Linear A tablet, Linear A cup, Model of Knossos
Sources:
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• "Linear A and Linear B." Encyclopedia Britannica. September 6, 2009. <http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/342055/Linear-A>
• "Linear A." Ancient Scripts.com. September 6, 2009. <http://www.ancientscripts.com/lineara.html>
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• "Knossos - The Palace of Minos." Odyssey - Adventures in Archaeology. September 6, 2009. <http://www.odysseyadventures.ca/articles/knossos/knossos_evans.htm>
• "Knossos Minoan Palace." Explore Crete. September 6, 2009. <http://www.explorecrete.com/Knossos/knossos.html>
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• "Iraklion ( Heraklion ) Crete island /Knossos." Travel Info.gr. September 6, 2009. <http://www.travelinfo.gr/iraklio/knossos.htm>

All images are Copyright - CC BY-SA (Creative Commons Share Alike) by their respective owners, except for Petey, which is Public Domain (PD) or unless otherwise noted.

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