The Cypro-Minoan syllabary (CM) is an undeciphered

syllabary In the linguistic study of written languages, a syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent the syllables or (more frequently) moras which make up words. A symbol in a syllabary, called a syllabogram, typically represents an (option ...

used on the island of

Cyprus Cyprus ; tr, Kıbrıs (), officially the Republic of Cyprus,, , lit: Republic of Cyprus is an island country located south of the Anatolian Peninsula in the eastern Mediterranean Sea. Its continental position is disputed; while it is ...

during the

late Bronze Age The Bronze Age is a historic period, lasting approximately from 3300 BC to 1200 BC, characterized by the use of bronze, the presence of writing in some areas, and other early features of urban civilization. The Bronze Age is the second prin ...

(c. 1550–1050 BC). The term "Cypro-Minoan" was coined by

Arthur Evans Sir Arthur John Evans (8 July 1851 – 11 July 1941) was a British archaeologist and pioneer in the study of Aegean civilization in the Bronze Age. He is most famous for unearthing the palace of Knossos on the Greek island of Crete. Based on ...

in 1909 based on its visual similarity to

Linear A Linear A is a writing system that was used by the Minoans of Crete from 1800 to 1450 BC to write the hypothesized Minoan language or languages. Linear A was the primary script used in palace and religious writings of the Minoan civi ...

on Minoan Crete, from which CM is thought to be derived. Approximately 250 objects—such as clay balls, cylinders, and

tablet Tablet may refer to: Medicine * Tablet (pharmacy), a mixture of pharmacological substances pressed into a small cake or bar, colloquially called a "pill" Computing * Tablet computer, a mobile computer that is primarily operated by touching the ...

s and votive stands—which bear Cypro-Minoan inscriptions, have been found. Discoveries have been made at various sites around Cyprus, as well as in the ancient city of

Ugarit ) , image =Ugarit Corbel.jpg , image_size=300 , alt = , caption = Entrance to the Royal Palace of Ugarit , map_type = Near East#Syria , map_alt = , map_size = 300 , relief=yes , location = Latakia Governorate, Syria , region = ...

on the

Syria Syria ( ar, سُورِيَا or سُورِيَة, translit=Sūriyā), officially the Syrian Arab Republic ( ar, الجمهورية العربية السورية, al-Jumhūrīyah al-ʻArabīyah as-Sūrīyah), is a Western Asian country loc ...

n coast.

Emergence

Little is known about how this script originated or about the underlying language. However, its use continued into the early Iron Age, forming a link to the

Cypriot syllabary The Cypriot or Cypriote syllabary is a syllabic script used in Iron Age Cyprus, from about the 11th to the 4th centuries BCE, when it was replaced by the Greek alphabet. A pioneer of that change was King Evagoras of Salamis. It is descended fr ...

, which has been deciphered as Greek.

considered the Cypro-Minoan syllabary to be a result of uninterrupted evolution of the Minoan

script. He believed that the script was brought to Cyprus by Minoan colonizers or migrants. Evans' theory was uncritically supported until recently, when it was shown that the earliest Cypro-Minoan inscriptions were separated from the earliest texts in Linear A by less than a century, yet the Cypro-Minoan script at its earliest stage was substantially different from Linear A: it contained only syllabic signs while Linear A and its descendant Linear B both contained multiple ideograms, and its form was adapted to writing on clay while Linear A was better suited to writing with ink. The

Linear B Linear B was a syllabic script used for writing in Mycenaean Greek, the earliest attested form of Greek. The script predates the Greek alphabet by several centuries. The oldest Mycenaean writing dates to about 1400 BC. It is descended from ...

script that emerged a century later still retained many more features from, and most of the signary of, Linear A. All this evidence indicates a one-time introduction rather than long-time development.Ferrara, 2012, vol. 1

Varieties and periodization

The earliest inscriptions are dated about 1550 BC. Although some scholars disagree with this classification, the inscriptions have been classified by

Emilia Masson Émilia Masson (née Émilia Jovanovic-Slavinski; May 24 1940 - August 7 2017) was a linguist and epigrapher whose areas of research included the undeciphered Cypro-Minoan writing system from ancient Cyprus, and the ancient Anatolian language H ...

into four closely related groups: archaic CM, CM1 (also known as Linear C), CM2, and CM3, which she considered chronological stages of development of the writing. This classification was and is generally accepted, but in 2011 Silvia Ferrara contested its chronological nature based on the archaeological context. She pointed out that CM1, CM2, and CM3 all existed simultaneously, their texts demonstrated the same statistical and combinatorial regularities, and their character sets should have been basically the same; she also noted a strong correlation between these groups and the use of different writing materials. Only the archaic CM found in the earliest archaeological context is indeed distinct from these three.

Spread and extinction

The Cypro-Minoan script was absent in some Bronze Age cities of Cyprus, yet abundant in others. Unlike many other neighboring states, the

Late Bronze Age collapse The Late Bronze Age collapse was a time of widespread societal collapse during the 12th century BC, between c. 1200 and 1150. The collapse affected a large area of the Eastern Mediterranean (North Africa and Southeast Europe) and the Near ...

had only a slight impact on

Bronze Age Cyprus Bronze is an alloy consisting primarily of copper, commonly with about 12–12.5% tin and often with the addition of other metals (including aluminium, manganese, nickel, or zinc) and sometimes non-metals, such as phosphorus, or metalloids such ...

; in fact, the island culture flourished in the period immediately following the dramatic events of the collapse, and there was a visible increase in the use of the script in such centers as Enkomi. On the other hand, as a direct result of this collapse, the script ceased to exist in

, along with Ugarit itself. After that point, the number of Greek artifacts gradually increased in the Cypriot context, and around 950 BC the Cypro-Minoan script suddenly disappears, being soon substituted by the new

, whose inscriptions represent mainly the

Greek language Greek ( el, label= Modern Greek, Ελληνικά, Elliniká, ; grc, Ἑλληνική, Hellēnikḗ) is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages, native to Greece, Cyprus, southern Italy ( Calabria and Salento), souther ...

, with just a few short texts in Eteocypriot.

Language and cultural attribution

As long as the script remains undeciphered (with only about 15–20 signs having clear parallels in cognate scripts), it can only be speculated whether the language was the same as Minoan or Eteocypriot, and whether these two were identical or related. However, Silvia Ferrara and A. Bernard Knapp noted that the name "Cypro-Minoan" (based on the origin of the script) is rather deceptive, as the archaeological context of Cyprus was largely different from that of Minoan Crete, even in spite of visible traces of trade with Crete in the archaeological context, as well as the common presence of Cypriot and Cretan writing in Ugarit. There were no visible traces of Minoan invasion, colonization, or even significant cultural influence in

. At that time, the island was part of the Near-East cultural circle rather than

Aegean civilizations Aegean civilization is a general term for the Bronze Age civilizations of Greece around the Aegean Sea. There are three distinct but communicating and interacting geographic regions covered by this term: Crete, the Cyclades and the Greek mainla ...

. Based on the above-mentioned classification of the script into several varieties,

hypothesized that they may represent different languages that chronologically supplanted each other. Ferrara, while disproving Masson's hypothesis about these varieties as chronological stages, also indicated that the statistics of use of signs for all the varieties, as well as several noticeable combinations of signs, were the same for all the varieties, which may point to the same language rather than separate languages.

Artifacts

The earliest known CM inscription found in Europe was a

clay tablet In the Ancient Near East, clay tablets (Akkadian ) were used as a writing medium, especially for writing in cuneiform, throughout the Bronze Age and well into the Iron Age. Cuneiform characters were imprinted on a wet clay tablet with a sty ...

discovered in 1955 at the ancient site of Enkomi, near the east coast of Cyprus. It was dated to ca. 1500 BC, and bore three lines of writing. Other fragments of clay tablets have been found at Enkomi and Ugarit. Three examples have emerged at

Tiryns Tiryns or (Ancient Greek: Τίρυνς; Modern Greek: Τίρυνθα) is a Mycenaean archaeological site in Argolis in the Peloponnese, and the location from which the mythical hero Heracles performed his Twelve Labours. It lies south of M ...

, a large jug (4 signs), a clay boule (3 signs), and a Canaanite amphora (2 signs).

Clay balls

Dozens of small clay balls, each bearing 3–5 signs in CM1, have been uncovered at Enkomi and Kition.

Clay cylinders

Clay cylinders have been uncovered at Enkomi and Kalavassos-Ayios Dimitrios, some of which bear lengthy texts (more than 100 characters). It is likely that the balls and cylinders are related to the keeping of economic records on Minoan Cyprus, considering the large number of cross-references between the texts. The longest legible CM1 inscription is a cylinder found at Enkomi with 217 signs, dated to the 14th century BC.

Stirrup cups

Cypro-Minoan signs were found on stirrup cups in Cannatello, Sicily.

Decipherment

The extant corpus of Cypro-Minoan is not large enough to allow for the isolated use of a cryptographic solution to decipherment. Currently, the total number of signs on formal Cypro-Minoan signs (approx. 2,500) compares unfavorably with the number known from the undeciphered Linear A signs (over 7,000) and the number available in Linear B when it was deciphered (approx. 30,000). Furthermore, different languages may have been represented by the same Cypro-Minoan subsystem, and without the discovery of bilingual texts or many more texts in each subsystem, decipherment is extremely unlikely. According to

Thomas G. Palaima Thomas G. Palaima (born October 6, 1951) is a Mycenologist, the Robert M. Armstrong Centennial Professor and the founding director of the university's Program in Aegean Scripts and Prehistory (PASP) in the Department of Classics at the University ...

, "''all'' past and current schemes of decipherment of Cypro-Minoan are improbable". Silvia Ferrara also believes this to be the case, as she concluded in her detailed analysis of the subject in 2012.

Recent developments

Several attempts to decipher the script (Ernst Sittig, V. Sergeev, Jan Best etc.) were rejected by specialists due to numerous inaccuracies. In 1998, Joanna S. Smith and Nicolle Hirschfeld received the 1998 Best of Show Poster Award at the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America for their work on the Cypro-Minoan Corpus project, which aims to create a complete and accurate corpus of CM inscriptions, and archaeological and epigraphical discussions of all the evidence. Jean-Pierre Olivier issued an edition in 2007 of all 217 of the inscriptions available to him. Silvia Ferrara has prepared an even more comprehensive edition of the corpus as a companion volume to her analytic survey of 2012. In 2012–2013, Ferrara published two volumes of her research, where she studied the script in its archaeological context. It contained an additional 27 inscriptions. She also largely used statistical and combinatoric methods to study the structure of large texts and to detect regularities in the use of the signs. Her work is interesting for substantiated contesting of several important hypotheses largely accepted before, namely related to the emergence, chronological classification, language and "non-Minoan" attribution of the texts. Since then an additional 7 inscriptions have been published. In his 2016 PhD thesis, M.F.G. Valério produced a revised sign inventory and aimed to leverage previous hypotheses on decipherment and development of signs and values with a distributional analysis and comparative linguistic considerations. Unlike most other approaches on decipherment, he assumes a single script applied to a potentially broader range of languages, including Semitic (in Ugarit) and the indigenous language(s) of Cyprus. For the latter, he discusses a potential relationship with the Eteocypriot language, based on his readings.Valério, Miguel Filipe Grandão (2016)
Investigating the Signs and Sounds of Cypro-Minoan
PhD thesis, Universitat de Barcelona.

Unicode

Cypro-Minoan was added to the

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...

Standard in September 2021, with the release of version 14.0. The Unicode block for Cypro-Minoan is U+12F90–U+12FFF:

References

Sources

*Benson, J. L. and Masson, O. 1960. Cypro-Minoan Inscriptions from Bamboula, Kourion: General Remarks and New Documents, American Journal of Archaeology 64/2, pp. 145–151 * * *Cross, F. M. and Stager, L. E. 2006. Cypro-Minoan Inscriptions Found in Ashkelon, Israel Exploration Journal 56/2, pp. 129–159 * Facchetti, G. & Negri, M. (2014), Riflessioni preliminary sul ciprominoico. Do-so-mo 10, p. 9-25. * Fauconau, J. (1977), Études chypro-minoennes. Syria 54(3/4), pp. 209–249. * Fauconau, J. (1980), Études chypro-minoennes. Syria 54(2/4), pp. 375–410. * Faucounau, J. (1994), The Cypro-Minoan scripts: a reappraisal fifty years after John F. Daniel's paper. Κυπριακή Αρχαιολογία Τόμος ΙΙI (Archaeologia Cypria, Volume III), p. 93-106. * * * Ferrara, Silvia, ''Cypro-Minoan Inscriptions''. Vol. 1: Analysis (2012); Vol. 2: The Corpus (2013). Oxford University Press. and * * Nahm, Werner (1981). "Studien zur kypro-minoischen Schrift", ''Kadmos'' 20 (1981) 52-63; ''Kadmos ''23, 164-179. * Olivier, Jean-Pierre (2007), ''Edition Holistique des Textes Chypro-Minoens'', Fabrizio Serra Editore, Pisa-Roma, * * * Steele, P. M. (2013), A linguistic history of ancient Cyprus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (hard) and (soft) * Steele, Philippa M. (Ed.) (2013), ''Syllabic Writing on Cyprus and its Context'', Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, * *Duhoux, Yves,
Eteocypriot and Cypro-Minoan 1–3
, in: Kadmos 48, 2000, pp. 39-75, . {{DEFAULTSORT:Cypro-Minoan Syllabary Aegean languages in the Bronze Age Bronze Age Cyprus Bronze Age writing systems Cypriot culture Extinct languages of Europe Languages attested from the 16th century BC Languages extinct in the 11th century BC Obsolete writing systems Syllabary writing systems Undeciphered writing systems