Linear A (c. 2500 – 1450 BCE) is an undeciphered writing system, and was the primary script used in palace and religious writings of the Minoan civilization of Greece. Though it is the origin of the Linear B script (c. 1450 – 1200 BCE), which has been deciphered to discover it is an early form of Greek, and shares some of the same symbols, attempting to apply Linear B syllabic values to Linear A results in unintelligible words that appear unrelated to any known language. Archaeologist Arthur Evans, who was the first to define the Linear scripts named them after the characters that consisted as lines inscribed in clay, contrasted with the pictographic Cretan hieroglyphs (c. 2100 – 1700 BCE) used during the same period. The difficulty in deciphering the script is due to a lack of points of reference for reading the inscriptions, with 80% of its symbols being unique and not shared with Linear B.
Most of the artifacts containing Linear A script have been unearthed at three sites on Crete, but has also been found at other sites in Greece, as well as in Turkey and Israel. A total of 1427 specimens have been discovered so far, containing a total of 7362 to 7396 symbols – described as being equivalent to two sheets of paper worth of text.
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