The Cypriot or Cypriote syllabary is a syllabic script used in

Iron Age The Iron Age is the final epoch of the three-age division of the prehistory and protohistory of humanity. It was preceded by the Stone Age (Paleolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic) and the Bronze Age (Chalcolithic). The concept has been mostly appl ...

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 ...

, from about the 11th to the 4th centuries BCE, when it was replaced by the

Greek alphabet The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BCE. It is derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and was the earliest known alphabetic script to have distinct letters for vowels as ...

. A pioneer of that change was King Evagoras of Salamis. It is descended from the

Cypro-Minoan syllabary The Cypro-Minoan syllabary (CM) is an undeciphered syllabary used on the island of Cyprus during the late Bronze Age (c. 1550–1050 BC). The term "Cypro-Minoan" was coined by Arthur Evans in 1909 based on its visual similarity to Linear A on ...

, in turn, a variant or derivative of

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 ...

. Most texts using the script are in the

Arcadocypriot Arcadocypriot, or southern Achaean, was an ancient Greek dialect spoken in Arcadia in the central Peloponnese and in Cyprus. Its resemblance to Mycenaean Greek, as it is known from the Linear B corpus, suggests that Arcadocypriot is its desc ...

dialect of

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

, but also one bilingual (Greek and

Eteocypriot Eteocypriot is an extinct pre-Indo-European language that was spoken in Cyprus by the pre-Hellenic population until the Iron Age. The name means "true" or "original Cypriot" parallel to Eteocretan, both of which names are used by modern scholars ...

) inscription was found in

Amathus Amathus or Amathous ( grc, Ἀμαθοῦς) was an ancient city and one of the ancient royal cities of Cyprus until about 300 BC. Some of its impressive remains can be seen today on the southern coast in front of Agios Tychonas, about west ...

Origin

It has been established that the Cypriot syllabary is derived from the

; the latter is supposed to be derived from the

script, and certainly belongs to the circle of Aegean scripts. The most obvious change is the disappearance of ideograms, which were frequent and represented a significant part of Linear A. The earliest inscriptions are found on clay tablets. Parallel to the evolution of

cuneiform Cuneiform is a logo- syllabic script that was used to write several languages of the Ancient Middle East. The script was in active use from the early Bronze Age until the beginning of the Common Era. It is named for the characteristic wedg ...

, the signs soon became simple patterns of lines. There is no evidence of a Semitic influence due to trade, but this pattern seemed to have evolved as the result of habitual use.

Structure

The structure of the Cypriot syllabary is very similar to that of Linear B. This is due to their common origin and underlying language (albeit different dialects). The Cypriot script contains 56 signs. Each sign generally stands for a syllable in the spoken language: e.g. ka, ke, ki, ko, ku. Hence, it is classified as a syllabic writing system. Because each sign stands for an open syllable (CV) rather than a closed one (CVC), the Cypriot syllabary is also an 'open' syllabary.

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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, ...

characters in the U+10800–U+1083F range.

Differences between Cypriot syllabary and Linear B

The main difference between the two lies not in the structure of the syllabary but the use of the symbols. Final consonants in the Cypriot syllabary are marked by a final, silent e. For example, final consonants, n, s, and r are noted by using ne, re, and se. Groups of consonants are created using extra vowels.

Diphthong A diphthong ( ; , ), also known as a gliding vowel, is a combination of two adjacent vowel sounds within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: that is, the tongue (and/or other parts of the speech ...

s such as ae, au, eu, and ei are spelled out completely. However,

nasal consonant In phonetics, a nasal, also called a nasal occlusive or nasal stop in contrast with an oral stop or nasalized consonant, is an occlusive consonant produced with a lowered velum, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. The vast major ...

s that occur before another consonant are omitted completely. Compare Linear B (, reconstructed as *) to Cypriot (), both forms related to grc-att, ἄνθρωπος () "human". One other minor difference involves the representation of the

manner of articulation In articulatory phonetics, the manner of articulation is the configuration and interaction of the articulators ( speech organs such as the tongue, lips, and palate) when making a speech sound. One parameter of manner is ''stricture,'' that is, ...

. In the Linear B script,

liquid A liquid is a nearly incompressible fluid that conforms to the shape of its container but retains a (nearly) constant volume independent of pressure. As such, it is one of the four fundamental states of matter (the others being solid, gas, an ...

sounds /l/ and /r/ are covered by one series, while there are separate series for the dentals /d/ and /t/. In the Cypriot syllabary, /d/ and /t/ are combined, whereas /l/ and /r/ are distinct.

Paleography

There are minor differences in the forms of the signs used in different sites. However, the syllabary can be subdivided into two different subtypes based on area: the "Common" and the South-Western or "Paphian".

Decipherment

The script was deciphered in the 19th century by George Smith due to the

Idalion bilingual The Idalion bilingual is a bilingual Cypriot– Phoenician inscription found in 1869 in Dali, Cyprus. It was the key to the decipherment of the Cypriot syllabary, in the manner of the Rosetta Stone to hieroglyphs. The discovery of the inscript ...

. Egyptologist

Samuel Birch Samuel Birch (3 November 1813 – 27 December 1885) was a British Egyptologist and antiquary. Biography Birch was the son of a rector at St Mary Woolnoth, London. He was educated at Merchant Taylors' School. From an early age, his manifest t ...

(1872), the numismatist Johannes Brandis (1873), the philologists

Moritz Schmidt Moritz is the German equivalent of the name Maurice. It may refer to: People Given name * Saint Maurice, also called Saint Moritz, the leader of the legendary Roman Theban Legion in the 3rd century * Prince Moritz of Hesse (2007), the son of ...

, Wilhelm Deecke, Justus Siegismund (1874) and the dialectologist H. L. Ahrens (1876) also contributed to decipherment.

Corpus

About 1,000 inscriptions in the Cypriot syllabary have been found throughout many different regions. However, these inscriptions vary greatly in length and credibility. Most inscriptions found are dated to be around the 6th century. There are no inscriptions known to be before the 8th century. Most of the tablets found are from funerary monuments and contained merely names of the deceased. A few dedicatory inscriptions were also found but of very little contribution to decipherment. The most important tablets are mainly found in

Enkomi Enkomi ( el, Έγκωμη; tr, Tuzla) is a village near Famagusta in Cyprus. It is the site of an important Bronze Age city, possibly the capital of Alasiya. Enkomi is under the ''de facto'' control of Northern Cyprus. In 1974, Enkomi had abou ...

and

Paphos Paphos ( el, Πάφος ; tr, Baf) is a coastal city in southwest Cyprus and the capital of Paphos District. In classical antiquity, two locations were called Paphos: Old Paphos, today known as Kouklia, and New Paphos. The current city of ...

. Efforts to collect and publish the known corpus began in the 1800s. In the 1900s the work was taken up by T. B. Mitford and Olivier Masson. Over the years a number of inaccuracies and duplications crept into the collects corpus. In 2015, Massimo Perna published a consolidated and corrected corpus totaling 1,397 inscriptions.

Enkomi

The earliest dated inscription from Cyprus was discovered at

in 1955. It was a part of a thick clay tablet with only three lines of writing. Epigraphers immediately saw a resemblance. Because the date of the fragment was found to be around 1500 BCE, considerably earlier than Linear B, linguists determined that the Cypriot syllabary was derived from

and not Linear B. Several other fragments of clay tablets were also found in Enkomi. They date to a later period, around the late 13th or 12th century BCE. The script found on these tablets has considerably evolved and the signs have become simple patterns of lines. Linguists named this new script as

Idalium

Idalium Idalion or Idalium ( el, Ιδάλιον, ''Idalion'') was an ancient city in Cyprus, in modern Dali, Cyprus, Dali, Nicosia District. The city was founded on the copper trade in the 3rd millennium BC. Its name in the 8th century BC was "Ed-di-al" a ...

was an ancient city in Cyprus, in modern Dali, Nicosia District. The city was founded on the copper trade in the 3rd millennium BCE. Its name in the 8th century BCE was "Ed-di-al" as it appears on the

Sargon Stele The Sargon Stele (German: Kition-Stele) was found in the autumn of 1845 in Cyprus on the site of the former city-kingdom of Kition, in present-day Larnaca to the west of the old harbour of Kition on the archaeological site of Bamboula. The language ...

of 707 BCE. From this area, archeologists found many of the later Cypriot syllabic scripts. In fact, Idalium held the most significant contribution to the decipherment of Cypriot syllabary – the Tablet of Idalium. It is a large bronze tablet with long inscriptions on both sides. The Tablet of Idalium is dated to about 480–470 BCE. Excluding a few features in morphology and vocabulary, the text is a complete and well-understood document. It details a contract made by the king Stasicyprus and the city of Idalium with the physician Onasilus and his brothers. As payment for the physicians' care for wounded warriors during a Persian siege of the city, the king promises them certain plots of land. This agreement is put under the protection of the goddess

Athena Athena or Athene, often given the epithet Pallas, is an ancient Greek goddess associated with wisdom, warfare, and handicraft who was later syncretized with the Roman goddess Minerva. Athena was regarded as the patron and protectress of ...

Recent discoveries

Recent discoveries include a small vase dating back to the beginning of the 5th century BCE and a broken marble fragment in the Paphian (Paphos) script. The vase is inscribed on two sides, providing two lists of personal names with Greek formations. The broken marble fragment describes a fragment of an oath. This inscription often mentions King Nicocles, the last king of Paphos and includes some important words and expressions. Four inscribed objects were found in the British Museum stores, a silver cup from Kourion, a White Ware jug, and two limestone tablet fragments.Kiely, Thomas and Perna, Massimo. "Four Unpublished Inscriptions in Cypriot Syllabic Script in the British Museum", KADMOS, vol. 49, no. 1, 2011, pp. 93-116

Future prospects

The number of discoveries of new inscriptions has increased. However, most of the new discoveries have been short, or bear only a few signs. One example is a small clay ball.

Unicode

The Cypriot syllabary was added to the

Standard in April 2003 with the release of version 4.0. The Unicode block for Cypriot is U+10800–U+1083F. The Unicode block for the related Aegean Numbers is U+10100–U+1013F.

References

Bibliography

* Steele, Philippa M. ''A Linguistic History of Ancient Cyprus: The non-Greek languages, and their relations with Greek, c. 1600–300 BC''. Cambridge University Press (2013). *Steele, Philippa M. ''Syllabic writing in Cyprus and its context''. Cambridge University Press (2013). *Steele, Philippa M. ''Writing and Society in Ancient Cyprus''. Cambridge University Press (2018). * Best, Jan and Fred Woudhuizen (eds.), ''Ancient Scripts from Crete and Cyprus'' (Leiden, Brill, 1988). *Egetmeyer, Markus, ''Wörterbuch zu den Inschriften im kyprischen Syllabar'' (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1992). *Heubeck, Alfred, ''Schrift.'' Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht (1979) 54–64. *Hintze, Almut, ''A Lexicon to the Cyprian Syllabic Inscriptions'' (Hamburg: Buske, 1993). *Masson, Olivier, and Terence B. Mitford, ''Les Inscriptions chypriotes syllabiques'' (Paris: Boccard, 1983). *Reece, Steve, ''The Cypriot Syllabaries,'' in

Graham Speake Graham Speake (born 9 June 1946, London) is a British classical philologist and Byzantinist. Education After attending St Paul's School in London, Speake studied Classics at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he won various prizes for, among oth ...

(ed.), ''Encyclopedia of Greece and the Hellenic Tradition'' (London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2000) 1587–1588. *Smith, Joanna S., ed. ''Script and seal use on Cyprus in the Bronze and Iron Ages''. Archaeological Institute of America (2002).

External links

Omniglot.com – Cypriot syllabarywww.palaeolexicon.com – Word study tool of ancient languages (includes Cypriot syllabic dictionary)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Cypriot Syllabary Syllabary writing systems Obsolete writing systems Cypriot culture Ancient Cyprus Hellenic scripts Arcadocypriot Greek History of the Greek language Right-to-left writing systems