Linear A

Linear A is the tantalising case — the one undeciphered script we can partly read aloud yet cannot understand. It was the administrative hand of Minoan Crete, and its younger relative Linear B — which reused many of the same signs — was famously deciphered by Michael Ventris in 1952 as an early form of Greek.

Borrowing those sign-values back, scholars can give many Linear A signs a probable sound, so a tablet can be voiced. But the language underneath, "Minoan", is unknown and unrelated to any language we can use as a key, so the sounds carry no meaning.

"We can pronounce it. We simply have no idea what we are saying."

The corpus is also small and almost entirely bookkeeping — inventories and totals, not the varied text a decipherment feeds on. The full case file sits downstairs in the Undeciphered Vault.

Roughly 1,400 inscribed objects survive, carrying about 7,400 sign tokens in all — a corpus so small that, typeset at 12 point, it fills under two pages of letter paper. Most texts are extremely short: a typical entry is a sign-sequence (a personal or place name) followed by a logogram for a commodity and a numeral. Very few inscriptions run to more than a handful of words.

The finds cluster on Crete. About half come from Haghia Triada (some 1,269 objects), with further groups from Zakros, Khania and Phaistos, and only around 32 from Knossos. Almost everything is accounting: inventories, receipts and totals kept on clay tablets and roundels — administration, not literature.