Linear A Corpus

The website is meant as a one-stop repository for scholars researching the yet undeciphered Linear A script. Linear A and Linear B were first discovered by the British Archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans around 1893, when he bought some clay tablets in Athens. During excavations in Knossos, Crete, in 1900, he found around 3000 other clay tablets, which he transcribed and organised, publishing them in 'Scripta Minoa' (Evans 1909). He perceived that the scripts were two different and mutually exclusive writing systems, which later he classified as Linear A and Linear B. Sir Arthur Evans named the Minoan script 'Linear', because its characters consisted simply of lines inscribed in clay tablets, in contrast to the more pictographic and three-dimensional symbols in Cretan Hieroglyphs that were used more or less during the same period and were mainly inscribed in stone.