When this page is fully operational, it will have:
- How to read and write Linear A
- Spelling rules – Psychedelic.
- Ductus, the order in which you write lines – Permissive.
- Accurate period handwriting style – Stick the stylus between your toes.
- Letterforms – More complicated than copying a font off the internet.
- Formatting and punctuating text – Bronze Age paperwork 101.
- Making clay tablets – People love getting clay tablets. No, seriously. Give your local early history geek a clay tablet. They will squee. It’s like nerd catnip. I gave one to a lecturer, and she instantly licked it in front of everyone, then declared, “You can’t have it back! It’s mine! I licked it!”1 Give geeks clay tablets.
- How to use these lessons to write Linear B
- The sounds of the Minoan language – We know a surprising amount about what Minoan sounded like, but we’re still only about 80% of the way there.
- Frequently asked questions about Linear A and the Minoan language
- What was the language of Linear A? Minoan! What’s Minoan? That’s a tricky question.
- What’s the relationship between Linear A and Linear B?
- How do we know Linear B’s sounds apply to Linear A?
- Why hasn’t Linear A been deciphered?
- Can AI help decipher Linear A? No.
- Is the Linear A script related to Egyptian hieroglyphs? No, although several symbols resemble Egyptian symbols closely enough to be borrowings.
- Is the Minoan language related to Hittite, Hurrian, Luwian, Egyptian, or other languages of the region? Not as far as we know, although there may be some loanwords.
- Is the Minoan language related to other known language isolates like Etruscan and Basque? Not as far as we know.
- Did the Minoan language come from the Minoans’ Anatolian Farmer ancestors? That’s a logical theory, but we don’t know enough about the languages of the Anatolian Farmers to test it.
- Did the Greek alphabet develop out of Linear A or B? No, it developed out of the Phoenician alphabet.
- Did the Phoenician alphabet develop out of Linear A or B? No, it’s the granddaughter of Egyptian hieroglyphs.
- Hey, Linear A letters look a lot like symbols from [insert script here]! A lot of basic symbols recur in early scripts because when humans noodle around with a stick, we draw a lot of crosses, lines with bars through them, Y shapes, T shapes, H shapes, circles with things inside, etc. The important questions are: 1. Are the sound values alike or different? and 2. Are the more complex symbols in the two scripts also similar?
- Is the Phaistos Disc in Linear A? No, although the script is probably related.
- What does the newly found ivory scepter say? They haven’t published the inscriptions yet. Lineara.xyz lists it as KNZg57a, KNZg57b, and KNZg58, with fragmentary inscriptions, but there’s not enough to comment on yet.
- Frequently asked questions about the Minoans
- What did the Minoans call themselves?
- What happened to the Minoans when the Greeks took over?
- Were the Minoans Greek? No, they were a separate culture with a distinct origin, although they were distantly related to the Greeks.
- What does DNA say about the Minoans’ origins? They were part of the great migrations of people into southern Europe around 9,000 years ago, with a significant amount of DNA from the “Anatolian Farmer” peoples that predated the migration.
- Crank theories
- Was the language of Linear A Greek? No.
- Was the Minoan language related to Hungarian? No, Peter Revesz is a twit.
- Was the Minoan language related to Japanese? No.
- Was the Linear A script related to Carian or Old Hungarian? No, Peter Revesz is a twit.
- Did the Minoans emigrate from Africa? No. This outdated theory was logical at the time, given the Egyptian influences apparent in Minoan art, but DNA evidence has shown conclusively that the Minoans and their African contemporaries were unrelated. Anyone who clings to this theory today is a crank.
- Was Michael Ventris killed to prevent him from unveiling new information about Linear A? No, his death was either a tragic accident or–given how his life was falling apart–a suicide. There’s no evidence that he ever did substantive work on Linear A, or that anyone would have benefited from suppressing any work he did do.
- Was Michael Ventris killed in retaliation for upsetting the status quo on Linear B? No. First, his partner in deciphering Linear B, John Chadwick, continued to research and publish on Linear B undisturbed for several decades, despite being essential to the decipherment. Second, once the academic community got past their shock, they were all pretty dang excited to be able to read Linear B. Third, WTF do you think the academic world was like in 1956? Have you met any academics? James Bond they’re not.
- Please don’t lick clay tablets! First find out whether they’re made of real baked clay (safe), dried unbaked clay (can dissolve) or quick-dry clay (can dissolve, probably tastes weird). I’ll be teaching you how to make tablets out of quick-dry clay. ↩︎