Linear A

At the turn of the 20th century, Sir Arthur Evans was obsessed with Crete and Knossos. He had no good reason to believe that this obsession would lead to one of the most important archaeological discoveries of the modern era.

As a reporter for the Manchester Guardian, he had traveled to the Balkans—the peninsula in southern Europe that culminates in Greece at the tip. There was a lot of resistance to the Ottoman Empire, and Evans’s writing focused on the culture of the region, including the ancient history. Evans had long been fascinated with this area of the world and the discoveries that still laid hidden.

The intricate interplay of culture, history, and politics in the Balkans certainly added fuel to his curiosity about the ancient past, drawing him towards the enigmatic ruins of Knossos on Crete. This island, steeped in legends and archaeological potential, promised a tangible connection to the ancient world that Evans had become so captivated by through his reporting.

After being riveted by the ancient lore, Evans became Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford in 1884, and he oversaw a great expansion of the collection, along with a modernization of its contents. He now had a more scholarly background to make sense of his obsession.

This dual background set him up to make one of the most important archaeological discoveries of the last several centuries. It also didn’t hurt that he had plenty of money to spend on this obsession, since his father had been a wealthy industrialist.

Evans bought some land at Knossos, where he could begin excavating and uncovering mystery after mystery.

The Mycenaean civilization was well known as a predecessor for the ancient Greeks. The DNA of the Greek language, art, and style were embedded in their culture, and they dominated Crete for 250 years, still centuries before the Athenians began to talk of democracy or philosophy.

It was a tremendous shock, then, to find a much earlier civilization, incredibly sophisticated in its own right. This prior culture lived centuries before the Mycenaeans, and they used a completely different written language.

Evans called this new culture “Minoan”, after the mythical King Minos who was supposed to have once ruled Crete.

Going back just a bit, archaeologists working in mainland Greece in the late 19th century had discovered clay tablets with inscriptions that were clearly similar to the ones Evans would later find in Crete. This script had come to be called simply "Mycenaean script" to reflect its location of discovery, and nobody knew how to read it.

As Evans and his team dug underneath Knossos, they found a bunch of tablets with script on them that was clearly similar to the Mycenaean script, helping to solidify the connection between the civilizations that lived on Crete and the larger Mycenaean world.

Evans noticed that there was a second script that was used on Crete, and that this second script had similar characters from the Mycenaean script. In order to draw a distinction between these two languages, Evans called the script he had just discovered “Linear A”, recognizing that it was the older of the two scripts. Mycenaean script became “Linear B.”

Five decades later, Linear B would be decyphered when place names and a bold guess led to the idea that the Greek language was descended from this old script. Once a few words were correctly translated, the process moved incredibly quickly.

Linear A, on the other hand, remains a mystery today.

Why “Linear” A and B? Well, there were simple lines that made up the script, as opposed to more pictorial symbols as used in Egyptian heiroglyphs or other Indo-European languages.

Because there were several common symbols used to indicate names and syllables, it became evident that Linear A was the ancestor language of Linear B. This meant that the Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations were linked together, with the Mycenaeans borrowing cultures and concepts from their predecessors.

Over time, a fuller picture of these two cultures became clear. The Minoans arose from the Neolithic culture of Crete some time around 3100 BCE, placing their civilization right there among the oldest and most influential ancient cultures ever to exist.

They were only replaced by the Mycenaeans after about 1600 years of dominance, and it’s not entirely clear if this was a takeover or a transition. Was there some kind of natural disaster that led to the quick downfall of the Minoans, or was there some kind of revolution?

Translating Linear A would certainly help us figure that mystery out, among many others. So far, no Minoan Rosetta Stone has turned up to jumpstart the translation process, so Linear A remains a deep mystery today. In the meantime, scholars and linguists continue to try to solve the puzzle.

What could a translated language uncover for us? If we knew how to read Linear A, what do you think we’d discover about the Minoans?