Ester Salgarella - Böcker

The Bronze Age Aegean and Cyprus were home to a plethora of scripts, including Cretan Hieroglyphic, Linear A and Linear B, Cypro-Minoan and Cypro-Syllabic. This Element is dedicated to the conventionally named 'Minoan' Linear A script, used on Crete and the Aegean islands during the Middle and Late Bronze Age (ca. 1800-1450 BCE). Linear A is still undeciphered, and the language it encodes ('Minoan') thus remains elusive. Notwithstanding, scholars have been able to extract a good amount of information from Linear A inscriptions and their contexts of use. Current ongoing research, integrating the materiality of script with linguistic analysis, offers a cutting-edge approach with promising results. This Element considers Linear A within an investigative framework as well as narrative, shedding light on a number of burning questions in the field, often the subject of intense academic debate.

The Bronze Age Aegean and Cyprus were home to a plethora of scripts, including Cretan Hieroglyphic, Linear A and Linear B, Cypro-Minoan and Cypro-Syllabic. This Element is dedicated to the conventionally named 'Minoan' Linear A script, used on Crete and the Aegean islands during the Middle and Late Bronze Age (ca. 1800-1450 BCE). Linear A is still undeciphered, and the language it encodes ('Minoan') thus remains elusive. Notwithstanding, scholars have been able to extract a good amount of information from Linear A inscriptions and their contexts of use. Current ongoing research, integrating the materiality of script with linguistic analysis, offers a cutting-edge approach with promising results. This Element considers Linear A within an investigative framework as well as narrative, shedding light on a number of burning questions in the field, often the subject of intense academic debate.

When does a continuum become a divide? This book investigates the genetic relationship between Linear A and Linear B, two Bronze Age scripts attested on Crete and Mainland Greece and understood to have developed one out of the other. By using an interdisciplinary methodology, this research integrates linguistic, epigraphic, palaeographic and archaeological evidence, and places the writing practice in its sociohistorical setting. By challenging traditional views, this work calls into question widespread assumptions and interpretative schemes on the relationship between these two scripts, and opens up new perspectives on the ideology associated with the retention, adaptation and transmission of a script, and how identity was negotiated at a moment of closer societal interaction between Cretans and Greek-speaking Mainlanders in the Late Bronze Age. By delving deeper into the structure and inner workings of these two writing systems, this book will make us rethink the relationship between Linear A and B.