![Cyprominoansyllabaryconsensus](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1f/Cyprominoansyllabaryconsensus.png)
The Cypro-Minoan syllabary (CM) is an
undeciphered syllabary
In the linguistic study of written languages, a syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent the syllables or (more frequently) moras which make up words.
A symbol in a syllabary, called a syllabogram, typically represents an (optiona ...
used on the island of
Cyprus
Cyprus ; tr, Kıbrıs (), officially the Republic of Cyprus,, , lit: Republic of Cyprus is an island country located south of the Anatolian Peninsula in the eastern Mediterranean Sea. Its continental position is disputed; while it is geo ...
during the
late Bronze Age
The Bronze Age is a historic period, lasting approximately from 3300 BC to 1200 BC, characterized by the use of bronze, the presence of writing in some areas, and other early features of urban civilization. The Bronze Age is the second pri ...
(c. 1550–1050 BC). The term "Cypro-Minoan" was coined by
Arthur Evans
Sir Arthur John Evans (8 July 1851 – 11 July 1941) was a British archaeologist and pioneer in the study of Aegean civilization in the Bronze Age. He is most famous for unearthing the palace of Knossos on the Greek island of Crete. Based on ...
in 1909 based on its visual similarity to
Linear A
Linear A is a writing system that was used by the Minoans of Crete from 1800 to 1450 BC to write the hypothesized Minoan language or languages. Linear A was the primary script used in palace and religious writings of the Minoan civil ...
on
Minoan Crete
The Minoan civilization was a Bronze Age Aegean civilization on the island of Crete and other Aegean Islands, whose earliest beginnings were from 3500BC, with the complex urban civilization beginning around 2000BC, and then declining from 1450B ...
, 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
)
, image =Ugarit Corbel.jpg
, image_size=300
, alt =
, caption = Entrance to the Royal Palace of Ugarit
, map_type = Near East#Syria
, map_alt =
, map_size = 300
, relief=yes
, location = Latakia Governorate, Syria
, region = F ...
on the
Syria
Syria ( ar, سُورِيَا or سُورِيَة, translit=Sūriyā), officially the Syrian Arab Republic ( ar, الجمهورية العربية السورية, al-Jumhūrīyah al-ʻArabīyah as-Sūrīyah), is a Western Asian country loc ...
n coast.
Emergence
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
The Cypriot or Cypriote syllabary is a syllabic script used in Iron Age Cyprus, from about the 11th to the 4th centuries BCE, when it was replaced by the Greek alphabet. A pioneer of that change was King Evagoras of Salamis. It is descended fr ...
, which has been deciphered as Greek.
Arthur Evans
Sir Arthur John Evans (8 July 1851 – 11 July 1941) was a British archaeologist and pioneer in the study of Aegean civilization in the Bronze Age. He is most famous for unearthing the palace of Knossos on the Greek island of Crete. Based on ...
considered the Cypro-Minoan syllabary to be a result of uninterrupted evolution of the Minoan
Linear A
Linear A is a writing system that was used by the Minoans of Crete from 1800 to 1450 BC to write the hypothesized Minoan language or languages. Linear A was the primary script used in palace and religious writings of the Minoan civil ...
script. He believed that the script was brought to Cyprus by
Minoan
The Minoan civilization was a Bronze Age Aegean civilization on the island of Crete and other Aegean Islands, whose earliest beginnings were from 3500BC, with the complex urban civilization beginning around 2000BC, and then declining from 1450B ...
colonizers or migrants. Evans' theory was uncritically supported until recently, when it was shown that the earliest Cypro-Minoan inscriptions were separated from the earliest texts in Linear A by less than a century, yet the Cypro-Minoan script at its earliest stage was substantially 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. The
Linear B
Linear B was a syllabic script used for writing in Mycenaean Greek, the earliest attested form of Greek. The script predates the Greek alphabet by several centuries. The oldest Mycenaean writing dates to about 1400 BC. It is descended from ...
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.
[Ferrara, 2012, vol. 1]
Varieties and periodization
The earliest inscriptions are dated about 1550 BC.
Although some scholars disagree with this classification, the inscriptions have been classified by
Emilia Masson
Émilia Masson (née Émilia Jovanovic-Slavinski; May 24 1940 - August 7 2017) was a linguist and epigrapher whose areas of research included the undeciphered Cypro-Minoan writing system from ancient Cyprus, and the ancient Anatolian language Hit ...
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 the same statistical and combinatorial regularities, and their character sets should have been basically the same; she also noted a 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.
Spread and extinction
The Cypro-Minoan script was absent in some Bronze Age cities of Cyprus, yet abundant in others.
Unlike many other neighboring states, the
Late Bronze Age collapse had only a slight impact on
Bronze Age Cyprus; in fact, the island culture flourished in the period immediately following the dramatic events of the collapse, and there was a visible increase in the use of the script in such centers as
Enkomi. On the other hand, as a direct result of this collapse, the script ceased to exist in
Ugarit
)
, image =Ugarit Corbel.jpg
, image_size=300
, alt =
, caption = Entrance to the Royal Palace of Ugarit
, map_type = Near East#Syria
, map_alt =
, map_size = 300
, relief=yes
, location = Latakia Governorate, Syria
, region = F ...
, along with Ugarit itself. After that point, the number of Greek artifacts gradually increased in the Cypriot context, and around 950 BC the Cypro-Minoan script suddenly disappears, being soon substituted by the new
Cypriot syllabary
The Cypriot or Cypriote syllabary is a syllabic script used in Iron Age Cyprus, from about the 11th to the 4th centuries BCE, when it was replaced by the Greek alphabet. A pioneer of that change was King Evagoras of Salamis. It is descended fr ...
, whose inscriptions represent mainly the
Greek language
Greek ( el, label=Modern Greek, Ελληνικά, Elliniká, ; grc, Ἑλληνική, Hellēnikḗ) is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages, native to Greece, Cyprus, southern Italy (Calabria and Salento), southern Al ...
, with just a few short texts in
Eteocypriot
Eteocypriot is an extinct pre-Indo-European language that was spoken in Cyprus by the pre-Hellenic population until the Iron Age. The name means "true" or "original Cypriot" parallel to Eteocretan, both of which names are used by modern scholars ...
.
Language and cultural attribution
As long as the script remains undeciphered (with only about 15–20 signs having clear parallels in cognate scripts), it can only be speculated whether the language was the same as
Minoan
The Minoan civilization was a Bronze Age Aegean civilization on the island of Crete and other Aegean Islands, whose earliest beginnings were from 3500BC, with the complex urban civilization beginning around 2000BC, and then declining from 1450B ...
or Eteocypriot, and whether these two were identical or related. However,
Silvia Ferrara
Silvia () is a female given name of Latin origin, with a male equivalent Silvio and English-language cognate Sylvia. The name originates from the Latin word for forest, ''Silva'', and its meaning is "spirit of the wood"; the mythological god of ...
and
A. Bernard Knapp noted that the name "Cypro-Minoan" (based on the origin of the script) is rather deceptive, as the archaeological context of Cyprus was largely different from that of Minoan Crete, even in spite of visible traces of trade with Crete in the archaeological context, as well as the common presence of Cypriot and Cretan writing in Ugarit. There were no visible traces of Minoan invasion, colonization, or even significant cultural influence in
Bronze Age Cyprus. At that time, the island was part of the
Near-East cultural circle rather than
Aegean civilizations
Aegean civilization is a general term for the Bronze Age civilizations of Greece around the Aegean Sea. There are three distinct but communicating and interacting geographic regions covered by this term: Crete, the Cyclades and the Greek mainland ...
.
Based on the above-mentioned classification of the script into several varieties,
Emilia Masson
Émilia Masson (née Émilia Jovanovic-Slavinski; May 24 1940 - August 7 2017) was a linguist and epigrapher whose areas of research included the undeciphered Cypro-Minoan writing system from ancient Cyprus, and the ancient Anatolian language Hit ...
hypothesized that they may represent different languages that chronologically supplanted each other. Ferrara, while disproving Masson's hypothesis about these varieties as chronological stages, also indicated that the statistics of use of signs for all the varieties, as well as several noticeable combinations of signs, were the same for all the varieties, which may point to the same language rather than separate languages.
Artifacts
The earliest known CM inscription found in Europe was a
clay tablet
In the Ancient Near East, clay tablets (Akkadian ) were used as a writing medium, especially for writing in cuneiform, throughout the Bronze Age and well into the Iron Age.
Cuneiform characters were imprinted on a wet clay tablet with a stylu ...
discovered in 1955 at the ancient site of
Enkomi, near the east coast of Cyprus. It was dated to ca. 1500 BC, and bore three lines of writing. Other fragments of clay tablets have been found at Enkomi and Ugarit. Three examples have emerged at
Tiryns
Tiryns or (Ancient Greek: Τίρυνς; Modern Greek: Τίρυνθα) is a Mycenaean archaeological site in Argolis in the Peloponnese, and the location from which the mythical hero Heracles performed his Twelve Labours. It lies south of Myce ...
, a large jug (4 signs), a clay boule (3 signs), and a Canaanite amphora (2 signs).
Clay balls
Dozens of small clay balls, each bearing 3–5 signs in CM1, have been uncovered at Enkomi and Kition.
Clay cylinders
Clay cylinders have been uncovered at Enkomi and Kalavassos-Ayios Dimitrios, some of which bear lengthy texts (more than 100 characters). It is likely that the balls and cylinders are related to the keeping of economic records on Minoan Cyprus, considering the large number of cross-references between the texts. The longest legible CM1 inscription is a cylinder found at Enkomi with 217 signs, dated to the 14th century BC.
Stirrup cups
Cypro-Minoan signs were found on stirrup cups in Cannatello, Sicily.
Decipherment
The extant corpus of Cypro-Minoan is not large enough to allow for the isolated use of a cryptographic solution to decipherment. Currently, the total number of signs on formal Cypro-Minoan signs (approx. 2,500) compares unfavorably with the number known from the undeciphered Linear A signs (over 7,000) and the number available in Linear B when it was deciphered (approx. 30,000). Furthermore, different languages may have been represented by the same Cypro-Minoan subsystem, and without the discovery of bilingual texts or many more texts in each subsystem, decipherment is extremely unlikely. According to
Thomas G. Palaima, "''all'' past and current schemes of decipherment of Cypro-Minoan are improbable". Silvia Ferrara also believes this to be the case, as she concluded in her detailed analysis of the subject in 2012.
Recent developments
Several attempts to decipher the script (Ernst Sittig, V. Sergeev, Jan Best etc.) were rejected by specialists due to numerous inaccuracies.
In 1998, Joanna S. Smith and Nicolle Hirschfeld received the 1998 Best of Show Poster Award at the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America for their work on the Cypro-Minoan Corpus project, which aims to create a complete and accurate corpus of CM inscriptions, and archaeological and epigraphical discussions of all the evidence. Jean-Pierre Olivier issued an edition in 2007 of all 217 of the inscriptions available to him.
Silvia Ferrara has prepared an even more comprehensive edition of the corpus as a companion volume to her analytic survey of 2012. In 2012–2013, Ferrara published two volumes of her research, where she studied the script in its archaeological context. It contained an additional 27 inscriptions. She also largely used statistical and combinatoric methods to study the structure of large texts and to detect regularities in the use of the signs. Her work is interesting for substantiated contesting of several important hypotheses largely accepted before, namely related to the emergence, chronological classification, language and "non-Minoan" attribution of the texts.
Since then an additional 7 inscriptions have been published.
In his 2016 PhD thesis, M.F.G. Valério produced a revised sign inventory and aimed to leverage previous hypotheses on decipherment and development of signs and values with a distributional analysis and comparative linguistic considerations. Unlike most other approaches on decipherment, he assumes a single script applied to a potentially broader range of languages, including Semitic (in Ugarit) and the indigenous language(s) of Cyprus. For the latter, he discusses a potential relationship with the
Eteocypriot
Eteocypriot is an extinct pre-Indo-European language that was spoken in Cyprus by the pre-Hellenic population until the Iron Age. The name means "true" or "original Cypriot" parallel to Eteocretan, both of which names are used by modern scholars ...
language, based on his readings.
[Valério, Miguel Filipe Grandão (2016)]
Investigating the Signs and Sounds of Cypro-Minoan
PhD thesis, Universitat de Barcelona.
Unicode
Cypro-Minoan was added to the
Unicode
Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology Technical standard, standard for the consistent character encoding, encoding, representation, and handling of Character (computing), text expre ...
Standard in September 2021, with the release of version 14.0.
The Unicode block for Cypro-Minoan is U+12F90–U+12FFF:
See also
*
Cypriot syllabary
The Cypriot or Cypriote syllabary is a syllabic script used in Iron Age Cyprus, from about the 11th to the 4th centuries BCE, when it was replaced by the Greek alphabet. A pioneer of that change was King Evagoras of Salamis. It is descended fr ...
*
Prehistoric Cyprus
The Prehistoric Period is the oldest part of Cypriot history. This article covers the period 10,000 to 800 BC and ends immediately before the documented history of Cyprus begins.
Epipalaeolithic
Cyprus was not settled in the Paleolithic (befo ...
References
Sources
*Benson, J. L. and Masson, O. 1960. Cypro-Minoan Inscriptions from Bamboula, Kourion: General Remarks and New Documents, American Journal of Archaeology 64/2, pp. 145–151
*
*
*Cross, F. M. and Stager, L. E. 2006. Cypro-Minoan Inscriptions Found in Ashkelon, Israel Exploration Journal 56/2, pp. 129–159
* Facchetti, G. & Negri, M. (2014), Riflessioni preliminary sul ciprominoico. Do-so-mo 10, p. 9-25.
* Fauconau, J. (1977), Études chypro-minoennes. Syria 54(3/4), pp. 209–249.
* Fauconau, J. (1980), Études chypro-minoennes. Syria 54(2/4), pp. 375–410.
* Faucounau, J. (1994), The Cypro-Minoan scripts: a reappraisal fifty years after
John F. Daniel's paper. Κυπριακή Αρχαιολογία Τόμος ΙΙI (Archaeologia Cypria, Volume III), p. 93-106.
*
*
* Ferrara, Silvia, ''Cypro-Minoan Inscriptions''. Vol. 1: Analysis (2012); Vol. 2: The Corpus (2013). Oxford University Press. and
*
* Nahm, Werner (1981). "Studien zur kypro-minoischen Schrift", ''Kadmos'' 20 (1981) 52-63; ''Kadmos ''23, 164-179.
* Olivier, Jean-Pierre (2007), ''Edition Holistique des Textes Chypro-Minoens'', Fabrizio Serra Editore, Pisa-Roma,
*
*
* Steele, P. M. (2013), A linguistic history of ancient Cyprus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (hard) and (soft)
* Steele, Philippa M. (Ed.) (2013), ''Syllabic Writing on Cyprus and its Context'', Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
*
*Duhoux, Yves,
Eteocypriot and Cypro-Minoan 1–3, in: Kadmos 48, 2000, pp. 39-75, .
{{DEFAULTSORT:Cypro-Minoan Syllabary
Aegean languages in the Bronze Age
Bronze Age Cyprus
Bronze Age writing systems
Cypriot culture
Extinct languages of Europe
Languages attested from the 16th century BC
Languages extinct in the 11th century BC
Obsolete writing systems
Syllabary writing systems
Undeciphered writing systems