‘En cours’ or …‘au secours’? The so-called ‘Minoan’ Linear A script of Bronze Age Crete (ca. 1800 – 1450 BCE) still resists decipherment after more than a century has gone by since its discovery. Have we really reached a stand still? And if so, why? In this lecture, Ester will guide the audience through the many challenges (and questions) scholars are confronted with when working on Linear A evidence, by exploring what the Linear A script looks like, how it functions, where it is attested, and which language(s?) it is likely to encode. Set in stone, as well as clay, this enigmatic script flourished on Crete and the Aegean islands in the second millennium BCE and writes a language which on present evidence cannot be uncontroversially related to any of the linguistic families so far known. Yet, there is a significant amount of information we can extrapolate from the terse Linear A inscriptions and their contexts of use, without necessarily having to rely on linguistic analysis only. Hence the question: is decipherment the only goal? This lecture will show that, even though we have not yet reached a full-blown decipherment of Linear A, we can nevertheless here its whispers through the cracks of time.
Ester Salgarella is an AIAS-AUFF Fellow at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies (University of Aarhus, Denmark). Both a linguist and an archaeologist by training, Ester specialises in Bronze Age Aegean scripts (2nd millennium BCE): her work integrates archaeology, linguistics, epigraphy, palaeography, and ancient history, and uses scripts (in their material and cognitive aspects) as a heuristic tool to investigate and reconstruct socio-cultural dynamics. Ester’s PhD dissertation (2018, University of Cambridge) is published as the monograph Aegean Linear Script(s): Rethinking the Relationship between Linear A and Linear B (Cambridge University Press, 2020), and her second book Writing in Bronze Age Crete: ‘Minoan’ Linear A (Cambridge University Press) is forthcoming. After her PhD, Ester was awarded a Junior Research Fellowship at St John’s College (Cambridge) and was Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of Classics (University of Cambridge). She then joined the INSCRIBE Project (ERC Consolidator Grant, University of Bologna) as a Post-doctoral Researcher, before moving to Aarhus.
