Cook, Mark The Deciphermant of Linear A

Crete, Egypt and the End of the Minoan Empire

Linear A is a script from the Middle and Late Bronze Age that was mainly used in Crete. It dates from between 1800 and 1450 BC and was discovered in 1900 by archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans. For over 120 years, it remained undeciphered until now. In his book, author Mark Cook, a forensic accountant, reveals how he deciphered Linear A. He describes how he initially approached the deciphering process by setting aside common preconceptions. Previous attempts at deciphering it mistakenly assumed that the underlying language was an unknown Minoan language (Crete was the centre of the Minoan empire), or misinterpreted its relationship to Linear B (the earliest form of Greek writing, which it replaced). Linear A is found mainly on clay tablets recording short-lived accounting information, and Mark Cook approached the decipherment as an accountant, focusing on the numbers, noticing the mathematical relationships between the recorded items (the relationships were obvious in the later Linear B script, which recorded the same things) and analysing the characters used to record them. Mark Cook shows that Linear A is Middle Egyptian, written in a form of shorthand used by the later Greeks and Romans, using hieroglyphs that were modified and simplified so that they could be quickly and easily carved into wet clay. Many of the tablets, he reveals, are Egyptian tax records. Based on the tablets he has translated and his reinterpretation of Egyptian evidence, Mark Cook concludes that New Kingdom Egypt eventually ruled Crete for a short time, rewriting our knowledge of the end of the Minoan empire.