THE DECIPHERMENT OF MINOAN LINEAR A - VOLUME II
Corpus of transliterated Linear A texts

The present Corpus of transliterated Linear A texts was started during my work on The onomastics of the ‘Minoan Linear A’ and ‘Linear B’ documents and their historical significance. Therefore, I was already able to include pages of the Corpus in the first edition of that work. In that edition I still used the conventional dots under the transliterated syllabic signs, ideograms, ligatures, numbers and fractions to indicate that their reading was not certain. Mainly for practical reasons, but also in order to avoid possible confusion with the usage of such dots for instance in phonetic representations, I have turned to a new convention of underlining to indicate uncertain readings. Also in citations, where others had used the old conventions, I have consistently used this new convention.

Nobody denies at present the decipherment of Linear B as a script, though even now not all (especially rare) syllabic signs have an established phonetic value. In Linear A this phenomenon occurs even to a higher degree, since we are sometimes dealing with writing variants of known signs, but at the same time have to allow for the possibility of really different phonetic values. I have provisionally used notations with q- in Linear A as in Linear B, although I am convinced that the labio-velar values of the Linear B signs in question are not applicable to their Linear A counterparts with graphic identity, which probably represent (voiced) velar fricatives as I have argued in The decipherment of Minoan Linear A, Volume I: Hurrians and Hurrian in Minoan Crete.

It is advisable to consult the editions with excellent photographs of the texts, such as L. Godart – J.-P. Olivier, Recueil des inscriptions en linéaire A, Vol. 1-5, Études Crétoises XXI, 1-5, Paris 1976-1985, while using this Corpus of transliterated Linear A texts. Only the photographs and ultimately the tablets and other objects on display in the musea are decisive for a sound judgement of the proposed readings.

The revised edition of the Corpus contains a new Linear A text found during the recent excavations at Gournia and some new readings. The first Linear A grid contained The main Linear A phonetic signs according to the Linear B syllabary. The revised edition contains a second Linear A grid in which the phonetic signs correspond with Hurrian cuneiform phonetic values. Based on confirmatory matches the phonetic values of some Linear A signs could be identified, cf. Volume I, Part I, Chapter 12: From undeciphered to deciphered Linear A signs. These values are now incorporated in the transliterated Linear A texts.