Cretan hieroglyphs are a hieroglyphic writing system used in early Bronze Age Crete, during the Minoan era. It predates Linear A by about a century, but the two writing systems continued to be used in parallel for most of their history. As of 2025, it is undeciphered.
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š Cretan hieroglyphs in the context of Malia (archaeological site)
Malia (also Mallia) is a Minoan and Mycenaean archaeological site located on the northern coast of Crete in the Heraklion area. It is about 35 kilometers east of the ancient site of Knossos and 40 kilometers east of the modern city of Heraklion. The site lies about 3 kilometers east and inland from the modern village of Malia. It was occupied from the middle 3rd millennium BC until about 1250 BC. During the Late Minoan I period (1700 - 1470 BC) it had the third largest Minoan palace, destroyed at the end of the Late Minoan IB period. The other palaces are at Hagia Triada, Knossos, Phaistos, Zakros, and Gournia. It has been excavated for over a century by the French School of Athens and inscriptions of the undeciphered scripts Cretan hieroglyphs, Linear A, and the deciphered script Linear B have been found there.
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Cretan hieroglyphs in the context of Linear A
Linear A is a writing system that was used by the Minoans of Crete from 1800 BC to 1450Ā BC. LinearĀ A was the primary script used in palace and religious writings of the Minoan civilization. It evolved into Linear B, which was used by the Mycenaeans to write an early form of Greek. It was discovered by the archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans in 1900. No texts in Linear A have yet been deciphered. Evans named the script "Linear" because its characters consisted simply of lines inscribed in clay, in contrast to the more pictographic characters in Cretan hieroglyphs ā likewise undeciphered ā that were used during the same period.
Linear A belongs to a group of scripts that evolved independently of the Egyptian and Mesopotamian systems. During the second millennium BC, there were four major branches: LinearĀ A, Linear B, Cypro-Minoan, and Cretan hieroglyphic. In the 1950s, Linear B was deciphered and found to have an underlying language of Mycenaean Greek. Linear A shares many glyphs and alloglyphs with LinearĀ B, and the syllabic glyphs are thought to notate similar syllabic values, but none of the proposed readings lead to a language that scholars can understand.
Cretan hieroglyphs in the context of Linear B
Linear B is a syllabic script that was used for writing in Mycenaean Greek, the earliest attested form of the Greek language. The script predates the Greek alphabet by several centuries, the earliest known examples dating to around 1450 BC. It is adapted from the earlier Linear A, an undeciphered script perhaps used for writing the Minoan language, as is the later Cypriot syllabary, which also recorded Greek. Linear B, found mainly in the palace archives at Knossos, Kydonia, Pylos, Thebes and Mycenae, disappeared with the fall of the Mycenaean civilization during the Late Bronze Age collapse. The succeeding period, known as the Greek Dark Ages, provides no evidence of the use of writing.
Linear B was deciphered in 1952 by English architect and self-taught linguist Michael Ventris based on the research of the American classicist Alice Kober. It is the only Bronze Age Aegean script to have been deciphered, with Linear A, Cypro-Minoan, and Cretan hieroglyphic remaining unreadable.
Cretan hieroglyphs in the context of Minoan language
The Minoan language is the language (or languages) of the ancient Minoan civilization of Crete written in the Cretan hieroglyphs and later in the Linear A syllabary. As the Cretan hieroglyphs are undeciphered and Linear A only partly deciphered, the Minoan language is unknown and unclassified. With the existing evidence, it is even impossible to be certain that the two scripts record the same language.
The Eteocretan language, attested in a few alphabetic inscriptions from Crete 1,000 years later, is possibly a descendant of Minoan, but is also unclassified.