Cretan hieroglyphs are a
hieroglyphic writing system
A writing system comprises a set of symbols, called a ''script'', as well as the rules by which the script represents a particular language. The earliest writing appeared during the late 4th millennium BC. Throughout history, each independen ...
used in early
Bronze Age
The Bronze Age () was a historical period characterised principally by the use of bronze tools and the development of complex urban societies, as well as the adoption of writing in some areas. The Bronze Age is the middle principal period of ...
Crete
Crete ( ; , Modern Greek, Modern: , Ancient Greek, Ancient: ) is the largest and most populous of the Greek islands, the List of islands by area, 88th largest island in the world and the List of islands in the Mediterranean#By area, fifth la ...
, during the
Minoan era. They predate
Linear A by about a century, but the two writing systems continued to be used in parallel for most of their history. , they are undeciphered.
Corpus
As of 1989, the corpus of Cretan hieroglyphic inscriptions included two parts:
* Seals and sealings, 150 documents with 307 sign-groups, using 832 signs in all.
* Other documents on clay, 120 documents with 274 sign-groups, using 723 signs.
More documents, such as those from the
Petras deposit, have been published since then. A four sided prism was found in 2011 at
Vrysinas in western Crete.
These inscriptions were mainly excavated at four locations:
*"Quartier Mu" at
Malia (
Middle Minoan II period = MM II)
*Malia palace (MM III)
*
Knossos
Knossos (; , ; Linear B: ''Ko-no-so'') is a Bronze Age archaeological site in Crete. The site was a major centre of the Minoan civilization and is known for its association with the Greek myth of Theseus and the minotaur. It is located on th ...
(MM II or III)
*the Petras deposit (MM IIB), 12 clay documents, 5 seal impressions, and 6 seals, excavated starting in 1995 and published in 2010.
The first corpus of signs was published by Evans in 1909. The current corpus (which excludes some of Evan's signs) was published in 1996 as the ''Corpus Hieroglyphicarum Inscriptionum Cretae'' (''CHIC''). It consists of:
* clay documents with incised inscriptions (CHIC H: 1–122)
* sealstone impressions (CHIC I: 123–179)
* sealstones (CHIC S: 180–314)
* the
Malia altar stone
* the
Arkalochori Axe
* seal fragment HM 992, showing a single symbol, identical to
Phaistos Disk glyph 21.
The relation of the last two items with the script of the main corpus is uncertain; the Malia altar is listed as part of the Hieroglyphic corpus by most researchers.
Since the publication of the CHIC in 1996 refinements and changes have been proposed. The main issue is that a number of symbols found on sealstones, tending to be more image-based, were deemed as purely decorative and not included in the sign list (or are transcribed when read). The concern is that this process may have resulted in actual signs being deprecated.
Some Cretan Hieroglyphic (as well as Linear A) inscriptions were also found on the island of
Samothrace in the northeastern Aegean.
Some scholars have suggested relations to
Anatolian hieroglyphs:
New exemplars continue to be found. During recent excavation at the Neopalatial area of the Cult Centre of the City of Knossos a seal stone was found in a foundation deposit. The steatite seal had four inscribed faces and the deposit dated to Final Palatial Period into LM III B. The room where the deposit was found had a "religious sceptre" inscribed all over with Linear A.
At
Zakros three sealings inscribed with Cretan hieroglyphs were found in the same deposit with a Linear A tablet and a
Linear A inscribed roundel. The deposit was in a destruction layer dated between layers LM IA and LM IB.
Signs
Symbol inventories have been compiled by , , and .
The glyph inventory in CHIC includes 96
syllabograms representing sounds, ten of which double as
logograms, representing words or portions of words.
There are also 23 logograms representing four levels of numerals (units, tens, hundreds, thousands), nine signs for numerical fractions, and two types of punctuation.
Many symbols have apparent
Linear A counterparts, so that it is tempting to insert
Linear B
Linear B is a syllabary, syllabic script that was used for writing in Mycenaean Greek, the earliest Attested language, attested form of the Greek language. The script predates the Greek alphabet by several centuries, the earliest known examp ...
sound values. Moreover, there are multiple parallels (words and phrases) from hieroglyphic inscriptions that occur also in Linear A and/or B in similar contexts (words for "total", toponyms, personal names etc.)
It has been suggested that several signs were influenced by Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Chronology
The development of hieroglyphs passed three important stages:
* Archanes script (signs look like pictograms, although their number and frequency rather suggest a syllabic script); this script was only described as a distinct stage in development of the Cretan hieroglyphic in the 1980s. Most of these seals contain a repetitive "Archanes formula" of 2–3 signs.
* Hieroglyphic A (best represented in archaeological records; similar to Archanes, but images of animals are reduced to heads only)
* Hieroglyphic B (mostly on clay, characters are essentially simplified, may have served as a prototype for Linear A and possibly the Cypro-Minoan script). Only this latter version of the hieroglyphic includes signs that can possibly match ideograms known from Linear A.
The sequence and the geographical spread of Cretan hieroglyphs, Linear A, and Linear B, the five overlapping, but distinct, writing systems of Bronze Age Crete and the
Greek mainland can be summarized as follows:
Fonts
The ''Aegean'' and ''Cretan Hieroglyphs'' fonts support Cretan hieroglyphs.
Unicode Fonts for Ancient Scripts
by George Douros
See also
* Eteocretan language
Notes
References
Works cited
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Further reading
* W. C. Brice,
Notes on the Cretan Hieroglyphic Script: I. The Corpus. II. The Clay Bar from Malia, H20
'' Kadmos 29 (1990) 1-10.
* W. C. Brice, ''Cretan Hieroglyphs & Linear A'', Kadmos 29 (1990) 171-2.
* W. C. Brice
''Notes on the Cretan Hieroglyphic Script: III. The Inscriptions from Mallia Quarteir Mu. IV. The Clay Bar from Knossos, P116''
Kadmos 30 (1991) 93–104.
* W. C. Brice,
Notes on the Cretan Hieroglyphic Script
, Kadmos 31, pp. 21–24, 1992
* M. Civitillo,
La scrittura geroglifica minoica sui sigilli. Il messaggio della glittica protopalaziale
, Biblioteca di Pasiphae XII, Pisa-Roma 2016.
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* Silvia Ferrara,
The Making of a Script: Cretan Hieroglyphic and the Quest for Its Origins"
Bulletin of ASOR, vol. 386, pp. 1–22, November 2021
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*Ferrara, Silvia, "Icon, index, symbol: Language notation in the Cretan Hieroglyphic script", Representations: Material and Immaterial Modes of Communication in the Bronze Age Aegean, Oxford, pp. 211-240, 2021
*Grumach E., "The Structure of the Cretan Hieroglyphic Script", Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 46, pp. 346-384, 1964
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* G. A. Owens, ''An Introduction to «Cretan Hieroglyphs»: A Study of «Cretan Hieroglyphic» Inscriptions in English Museums (excluding the Ashmolean Museum Oxford)'', Cretan Studies VIII (2002), 179–184.
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* I. Schoep,
A New Cretan Hieroglyphic Inscription from Malia (MA/V Yb 03)
', Kadmos 34 (1995), 78–80.
eingarten, Judith, and Silvia Ferrara, "Cretan Hieroglyphic seals and script: a view from the East", Pasiphae: rivista di filologia e antichità egee: XVI, pp. 111-121, 2022
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External links
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The Cretan Hieroglyphic Texts
Cretan Hieroglyphic Texts Explorer
{{DEFAULTSORT:Cretan Hieroglyphs
Cretan hieroglyphs,
Undeciphered writing systems