Every surviving word of Linear A would fit on under two pages
The Minoans of Crete wrote in Linear A for some 350 years, and scholars can pronounce many of its signs. They still cannot read it. Part of the problem is scale: typeset in 12-point font, the entire readable corpus fills just 1.84 pages of letter paper.
Linear A was used from about 1800 to 1450 BC, mostly for palace administration and religious objects. Arthur Evans gave it its name because its characters are simple lines scratched in clay, unlike the more pictorial Cretan hieroglyphs of the same era, which are also undeciphered. It belongs to a family of Aegean scripts that grew up independently of Egyptian and Mesopotamian writing.
Its younger sibling offers a tantalising half-key. The Mycenaeans adapted Linear A into Linear B, which was cracked in the 1950s and turned out to record an early form of Greek. Because the two scripts share many signs, researchers can assign rough sound values to Linear A syllables, yet the words produced match no language anyone understands. Numbers are easier: a decimal system of dashes, circles and rayed circles can be read and calculated much like Roman numerals, though the fraction signs are still disputed.
Around 1,400 inscriptions survive, totalling some 7,400 signs, drawn from a repertoire of over 300 signs of which about 90 appear regularly. Roughly half come from Hagia Triada in southern Crete, and they appear on clay tablets, stone offering tables, pottery and even gold and silver hairpins. About 1,000 stone libation tables are known, and 41 carry inscriptions following a repeated formula, much studied as a possible entry point. A rescue dig in modern Knossos turned up an ivory sceptre bearing the longest known Linear A text.
Ironically, disaster preserved the archive. Clay tablets were normally wiped and reused, but fires that destroyed Minoan towns and administrative centres in the script's final decades baked them hard. Since 2020 a project called SigLA has worked to bring every known inscription together online.
Source: Linear A
