Cretan hieroglyphs
Cretan hieroglyphs are a hieroglyphic writing system used in early Bronze Age Crete, 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.
These inscriptions were mainly excavated at four locations:
- "Quartier Mu" at Malia
- Malia palace
- Knossos
- the Petras deposit, excavated starting in 1995 and published in 2010.
- clay documents with incised inscriptions
- sealstone impressions
- sealstones
- the Malia altar stone
- the Phaistos Disc
- the Arkalochori Axe
- seal fragment HM 992, showing a single symbol, identical to Phaistos Disk glyph 21.
Some Cretan Hieroglyphic inscriptions were also found on the island of Samothrace in the northeastern Aegean.
It has been suggested that there was an evolution of the hieroglyphs into the linear scripts. Also, some relations to Anatolian hieroglyphs have been suggested:
Signs
Symbol inventories have been compiled by Evans, Meijer, and Olivier/Godart.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, numerical fractions, and two types of punctuation.
Many symbols have apparent Linear A counterparts, so that it is tempting to insert Linear B sound values. Moreover, there are multiple parallels from hieroglyphic inscriptions that occur also in Linear A and/or B in similar contexts
Chronology
The sequence and the geographical spread of Cretan hieroglyphs, Linear A, and Linear B, the three overlapping, but distinct, writing systems on Bronze Age Crete and the Greek mainland can be summarized as follows:| Writing system | Geographical area | Time span |
| Cretan Hieroglyphic | Crete | c. 2100–1700 BC |
| Linear A | Crete, Aegean islands, and Greek mainland | c. 1800–1450 BC |
| Linear B | Crete, and mainland | c. 1450–1200 BC |