Cypro-Minoan syllabary
| Cypro-Minoan |
|
|---|---|
 |
|
| Type |
Syllabary
|
| Languages | unknown |
|
Time period
|
ca. 1550–1050 BC |
| Status | Extinct |
|
Parent systems
|
Linear A
|
|
Child systems
|
Cypriot syllabary |
The Cypro-Minoan syllabary (CM) is an undeciphered syllabary used on the island of Cyprus during the late Bronze Age (ca. 1550–1050 BC). The term "Cypro-Minoan" was coined by Arthur Evans in 1909 based on its visual similarity to Linear A on Minoan Crete, from which CM is thought to be derived. Approximately 250 objects—such as clay balls, cylinders, and tablets and votive stands—which bear Cypro-Minoan inscriptions, have been found. Discoveries have been made at various sites around Cyprus, as well as in the ancient city of Ugarit on the Syrian coast.
Little is known about how this script originated or about the underlying language. However, its use continued into the early Iron Age, forming a link to the Cypriot syllabary, which has been deciphered as Greek.
Arthur Evans considered the Cypro-Minoan syllabary to be a result of uninterrupted evolution of the Minoan Linear A script. He believed that the script was brought to Cyprus by Minoan colonizers or immigrants. Evans' theory was uncritically supported until recently, when it was shown that the earliest Cypro-Minoan inscription were separated from the earliest texts in Linear A by less than a century, yet the Cypro-Minoan script at its earliest stage was much different from Linear A: it contained only syllabic signs while Linear A and its descendant Linear B both contained multiple ideograms, and its form was adapted to writing on clay while Linear A was better suited to writing with ink. It is noteworthy that the Linear B script that emerged a century later still retained many more features from, and most of the signary of, Linear A. All this evidence indicates a one-time introduction rather than long-time development.
The earliest inscriptions are dated about 1550 BC.
Although some scholars disagree with this classification, the inscriptions have been classified by Emilia Masson into four closely related groups: archaic CM, CM1 (also known as Linear C), CM2, and CM3, which she considered chronological stages of development of the writing. This classification was and is generally accepted, but in 2011 Silvia Ferrara contested its chronological nature based on the archaeological context. She pointed out that CM1, CM2, and CM3 all existed simultaneously, their texts demonstrated same statistical and combinatorial regularities, their character sets should have been basically the same; she points out at strong correlation between these groups and the use of different writing materials. Only the archaic CM found in the earliest archaeological context is indeed distinct from these three.
...
Wikipedia