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Survey of the five corpora of pre-Hellenic Cretan inscriptions: date; type of documents; length of the texts; characteristics of the writings; main linguistics features; current state of the decipherments, linguistic interpretations and identifications; future of the research.
1. Introduction
Although Crete is the largest Greek island (c. 8.314 km2), it is only the fifth biggest island of the Mediterranean. Crete is located at the nearly same distance of continental Greece and of Asia Minor (from which it is separated by the archipelagos of respectively the Cyclades and the Dodecanese). It lies a little further from the African coast of Libya and Egypt.
There are no sure traces of Cretan human settlement before the end of the Palaeolithic. It is only c. -68751, when Neolithic begins in Crete, that population appears. Three millennia and a half later, at the beginning of the Bronze Age, c. -3375, a new culture begins its individualisation, which is commonly called Minoan - on the use of "Minoan" for the Cretan pre-Hellenic language(s), see 33.3.1; on the meaning of "pre-Hellenic", see below. The name "Minoan" is modern and comes from the mythical Cretan king Minos.
From c. -2100 - -1900 (MM Ia), the Minoan civilisation exhibits a surprising sprout of writings, which is quite unusual for such a restricted area. Within about 500 years, there are not less than four different scripts known:
Cretan "hieroglyphics" Linear A
Writing of the Phaestos disk Writing of the axe of Arkalokhori.
None of those writings is alphabetic. They all contain syllabograms and have clear ideographic components2. Until now, it has not proved possible to find an extra-Cretan origin for any of them.
Linear A will give birth to a daughter-writing, Linear B, which has been successfully deciphered in 19523. This great achievement proved that Linear B was a syllabary (of an open syllable type) used to write Greek. The Greek dialect written in Linear B has been conventionally called Mycenaean since then. Mycenaean Greek was imported in Crete by conquerors coming from continental Greece, and who controlled the island from c. -1450 on.
Since the Linear B texts are written in Greek, and are, moreover, of later date than the documents in the four other pre-alphabetic Cretan scripts, these latter may rightly be...