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:
More documents, such as those from the Petras deposit, have been published since then.
These inscriptions were mainly excavated at four locations:
The corpus was published in 1996 as the Corpus Hieroglyphicarum Inscriptionum Cretae. It consists of:
The relation of the last three items with the script of the main corpus is uncertain.
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 systemGeographical areaTime span
Cretan HieroglyphicCrete c. 2100–1700 BC
Linear ACrete, Aegean islands, and Greek mainland c. 1800–1450 BC
Linear BCrete, and mainland c. 1450–1200 BC

Fonts

Fonts Aegean and Cretan support Cretan hieroglyphs.

Footnotes