Discovery of Linear A
Descubrimiento del lineal A
- Date
- 1900 · confidence high
- Place
- Knossos, Crete, Greece
- Credited to
- Arthur Evans
- Field
- Knowledge & symbols
⚠️ Disputed: the sources disagree.
What was discovered
During his excavations of the palace of Knossos on Crete, Arthur Evans identified in 1900 a previously unknown syllabic writing system, distinct from Cretan hieroglyphs and predating Linear B, which he called 'Linear A' because it was written with simple lines on clay.
Unlike Linear B, Linear A remains undeciphered; the language it represents is not known with certainty, though it has been proposed to be a non-Indo-European Minoan language.
What it led to
- classification of Minoan writing systems
- an ongoing, so far unsuccessful, search for its decipherment
- comparisons with Linear B, which was deciphered in 1952