Description
The Bronze Age Aegean and Cyprus were home to a plethora of scripts, including Cretan Hieroglyphic, Linear A and Linear B, Cypro-Minoan and Cypro-Syllabic. This Element is dedicated to the conventionally named 'Minoan' Linear A script, used on Crete and the Aegean islands during the Middle and Late Bronze Age (ca. 1800–1450 BCE). Linear A is still undeciphered, and the language it encodes ('Minoan') thus remains elusive. Notwithstanding, scholars have been able to extract a good amount of information from Linear A inscriptions and their contexts of use. Current ongoing research, integrating the materiality of script with linguistic analysis, offers a cutting-edge approach with promising results. This Element considers Linear A within an investigative framework as well as narrative, shedding light on a number of burning questions in the field, often the subject of intense academic debate.
Table of Contents
1. Defining the (un)definable: what is Linear A?; 2. A tale of life and death: what is the life-span of Linear A?; 3. The Linear A corpus: where is Linear A found?; 4. Drawing lines: what does Linear A look like?; 5. Of clay and stone (and else): where does Linear A appear?; 6. (Beyond) accounting: what was Linear A used for?; 7. 'Elementary, my dear Watson': what do we know from reading Linear A?; 8. Speaking in riddles: which language does Linear A encode?; 9. More unresolved mysteries: what do we not have in Linear A?; 10. Current and future pathways of research: What's next?.
