Linear A and 'The Machine': A 'Brute Force Attack' to Decrypt the Minoan Code

The article summarizes the challenges that the Minoan script provides its aspiring glyph-breakers with and the strategies that my Team and I implemented, over the years, to better understand this elusive writing system. In particular, we tried to develop a completely unbiased approach, without any 'wild guess' inherent in the possible language (commonly called 'Minoan') 'hidden' behind Linear A. To do that, we needed to avail ourselves of cryptanalytic techniques historically used to break man-made crypto-systems, with an unavoidable and very strong computational approach. Undeciphered writing systems, despite being invented to facilitate (written) communication, became, over time, with the loss of their knowledge by speakers and people able to read and understand them, unintended crypto-systems. Attempts at deciphering them through Cryptanalysis (the branch of Cryptology - opposed to Cryptography - dealing with the decryption of ciphers) are, therefore, quite reasonable and often represent the only possible solution. In our case, we decided to implement a cryptanalytic 'brute force attack' aimed at systematically testing all the possible Linear A syllabograms against all the possible phonetic values from geographically and chronologically compatible (and deciphered) languages from the Aegean, the Mediterranean, and surrounding areas, looking for plausibly significant phonetic and phonological matches.