[Authors and titles are indicated at the end of the review]
Cretan Hieroglyphic is a welcome and necessary intervention in the study of Cretan Hieroglyphs, a script that suffers from a lack of book-length treatments. It is an ambitious volume that aims to provide an up-to-date overview of the script and present ongoing debates (2). It executes its ambitions admirably for an audience of Aegean scripts specialists, though non-specialists might find the volume too technical. Overall, the editors have accomplished their goal of reshaping Cretan Hieroglyphs studies for decades to come. The volume presents new communes opiniones on old debates, the differing opinions on unresolved debates, and provides a set of valuable indices that will facilitate continued study of Cretan Hieroglyphs.
The new communes opiniones assembled and presented in this volume are as follows: 1) the Cretan Hieroglyphic signs on seals, previously classified as decorative non-linguistic signs, are now considered to be script signs; 2) many, if not all contributors agree that some Cretan Hieroglyphic signs are used as logograms in the strict grammatological sense of the term, but that Cretan Hieroglyphs do not have ideograms like Linear B or A; 3) the early Archanes script is not, like an older theory suggested, Linear A, but may be Cretan Hieroglyphs or an independent Cretan Hieroglyphs-Linear A precursor with a limited archaeological footprint (for a summary of past views, 147); 4) local and Egyptian glyptic traditions were important in the foundation of Cretan Hieroglyphs, but Evans’ theory that Egyptian Hieroglyphs inspired the invention of Cretan Hieroglyphs cannot be substantiated by the current evidence. A new question challenging an old orthodoxy, however, has since arisen, as to whether the formula found on some Cretan Hieroglyphic documents is the same as that found on the libation tables written in Linear A (Ferrara, Montecchi, and Valério 2021).
Before proceeding, I want to present a serious complaint, one that is also raised in John Bennet and Vassilis Petrakis’ summarizing chapter (219): the editors’ framing of Cretan Hieroglyphs as “Europe’s first script,” both in the book’s abstract and in their introduction (Front Matter, 1). As Bennet and Petrakis note, this anachronistic monicker was first applied to Cretan Hieroglyphs by Arthur Evans to bolster his European supremacist worldview (Evans 1894: 271). While the editors’ motivations are surely different than Evans’s, their choice to engage in European boosterism is unfortunate. An alternative characterization, championed by Bennet and Petrakis and the present reviewer, is to describe Cretan Hieroglyphs as “Aegean,” which is more accurate and informative with respect to the networks within which Cretan Hieroglyphs was invented and used (219).
The book is divided into three thematic sections, 1) sign inventories and iconicity, 2) the status of Cretan Hieroglyphs on seals, and 3) the relationship between Cretan Hieroglyphs and Linear A, representing three ongoing areas of focus in the study of Cretan Hieroglyphs. After an introduction by the editors which historically situates the study of Cretan Hieroglyphs, Silvia Ferrara presents a historiography of Cretan Hieroglyphs sign inventories that lays out many of the key themes and debates taken up in subsequent chapters. Ferrara’s overview is even-handed and comprehensive. The section on the field’s most recent developments could have been enhanced with more explicit reference to the chronological progression of publications. A citation for the Corpus Hieroglyphicarum Inscriptionum Cretae (CHIC)’s definition of an inscription (17) should have been provided.
The next two chapters by Miguel Valério and Georgia Flouda complement one another by arriving at similar conclusions using different methodologies; they will therefore be treated together. Valério’s grammatological chapter explores the origins of Cretan Hieroglyphs through comparative and contextual frameworks, arguing that Cretan Hieroglyphs may be logo-syllabic in the true sense of the term (i.e., Cretan Hieroglyphs has logograms not commodity ideograms, 34). Flouda’s chapter, heavily informed by cognitive science, arrives at the same conclusion. Flouda’s careful analysis of a single example of the “double axe” sign convincingly shows that the sign functions as a logogram on the Myrtos Pyrgos prism (71). Valério also suggests that the function of some Cretan Hieroglyphs logograms can be inferred even as their phonetic value remains unknown (54). Confusingly, Valério and Flouda attribute the idea that the Cretan Hieroglyphic sign 044 iconically represents a Petschaft seal to different sources, Valério to Ferrara and Cristiani 2016 (54), and Flouda first to Karnava 2000 (65). Both chapters offer sophisticated reconfigurations of Evans’ theory of the Egyptian origins of Cretan Hieroglyphs.
Anna Margherita Jasink and Judith Weingarten, a dream-team of Minoan seal specialists, forcefully argue that Cretan Hieroglyphic sign sequences on seals always refer to the user and owner not the stamped object (77). They diverge from other authors in characterizing some seal types as “luxury ornaments” over-and-above any administrative function (85) and in conceiving of the Archanes script as a third Minoan script (88). In conceiving of seals as decorative, they suggest that script on seals is meant to be ‘seen’ and not ‘read’ (88). An important point of agreement with other contributors is the hypothesis that Cretan Hieroglyphs originated on seals.
Matilde Civitillo’s important contribution, informed by the materialist turn in grammatology, starts with the premise that the writing support is integral to the text’s meaning, and that text content and function determine the choice of writing support. Through a careful analysis of which sign sequences/‘formulae’ appear on which writing support, she identifies a correlation between the number of faces on a seal, its stone type, and its formula/sign sequence and concludes that an administrator’s role and status is linked to seal type (107). Her chapter ends with a hypothetical reconstruction of the specific seal types that were used at certain points in the administrative sequence (117).
Philippa Steele’s chapter, also informed by an interest in materiality, explores the impetus behind the decision of Cretan Hieroglyphic writers to adopt clay as a writing support. She situates its use in the context of sealing practices and clay crafts. Drawing on cognitive science, she compares the affordances of clay and stone as writing supports. Her hypothesis that the different affordances of writing on clay and stone could indicate that clay- and stone-writers would have been different people is reasonable, though the discovery of a stone-carving chisel inside a vellum workshop from a Pictish site reminds us that writers may have mastered several writing media (Whitworth 2025, 173).
Torsten Meissner and Ester Salgarella’s chapter combines rollicking good fun with sturdy scholarship. Divided into two sections, the first addresses the question of how to define the Cretan Hieroglyphs signary, siding with the new communis opinio that Cretan Hieroglyphs is a unified whole inclusive of signs on seals and clay (137). Onto the ‘rollicking’ second part, where Meissner and Salgarella suggest real-world referents for some iconic logographic Cretan Hieroglyphs signs applying the acrophonic principle with Linear B sound values to them. Their most convincing suggestion is that the double axe-shaped sign Cretan Hieroglyphs 42/AB 8 (which has the phonetic value “a” in Linear B) might abbreviate the word aor, which in Homer is a generic term for a weapon. They should, however, have recognized that their suggestion is not new (as summarized in Buchholz 1967), even though the older discussion was poorly grounded. Another intriguing proposal is that the sign ko iconically represents a spindle, following Nosch and Ulanowka 2021, and could indicate that the loanword word kollops, which later came to mean the peg of a wire around which the lyre string is wound, had an original textile meaning (160). This last observation tallies with a growing line of research linking textile production and script invention (Muti 2024).
Brent Davis uses syllabotactic analysis to assess the likelihood that Cretan Hieroglyphs records the same language as Linear A. Not strictly trained as a linguist myself, I find the chapter difficult to evaluate. As Davis himself admits in a footnote, syllabotactics has all but been discarded within the field of linguistics, though it has gained somewhat more traction in the field of automatic language and speech recognition. A search for “syllabotactics” on Google Scholar comes up with only 36 hits. Concerns about the durability of the approach aside, the argumentation is commonsensical, and the dataset is clearly presented. The decision to exclude the “catface” sign/AB 80 from the dataset for the sake of conservatism (i.e., based on CHIC’s assertion that it is a decoration and not a script sign), seems like a missed opportunity: the sign’s status as a syllabogram is accepted by all of the present volume’s authors (Flouda calls it “almost universally accepted,” 64). As the present volume signals, the time for conservatism in the study of Cretan Hieroglyphs is over.
A final chapter by Bennet and Petrakis, already mentioned above, does a wonderful job of situating Cretan Hieroglyphs within Aegean scripts studies in particular and grammatology more broadly. Bennet and Petrakis laud the move towards collaborative scholarship amongst what they call the “third generation” of Aegean scripts scholars, represented by many of the authors of the present volume, and call the volume a “watershed” in the study of Cretan Hieroglyphs (191). They lament that Aegean scripts scholarship has traditionally employed idiosyncratic terminology at odds with common usage in grammatology, that can limit exchange and engagement with other disciplines (193). Overall, their chapter provides engaging lines of inquiry for further study and serves as a useful summary of the volume’s contents.
An epilogue by John Younger is a fitting close to volume, reflecting on his involvement as a beta tester for CHIC. His establishment of the online Linear A and Cretan Hieroglyphs corpora in the late 1990s was a great aid to specialists and amateurs alike (222). Subsequent to the volume going to press, the University of Kansas made the unfortunate decision to stop hosting the website, as noted by the editors in a postscript (12).
The only omission, to this reviewer’s mind, is a historiographic chapter that situates recent contributions to the field chronologically; Ferrara’s chapter on the historiography of Cretan Hieroglyphs sign lists comes closest to fulfilling this desideratum but its narrower focus leaves some major developments underrepresented or hard to place in context. I felt this was particularly true regarding the dissertations of Artemis Karnava (2000) and, to a lesser extent, Roeland Decorte (2018). Minor criticisms aside, Cretan Hieroglyphic constitutes an important contribution to the study of Cretan Hieroglyphs that will advance its study for years to come, serving both as an up-to-date reference volume and providing future scholars with substantive ideas for future research.
Works Cited
Buchholz, H.-G., 1981. “Review of Early Greek Armour and Weapons from the end of the Bronze Age to 600 B.C. by Anthony Snodgrass.” Gnomon 39(1): 78–82.
CHIC = Olivier, J.-P., and L. Godart with the collaboration of J.-C. Poursat. 1996. Corpus Hieroglyphicarum Inscriptionum Cretae, De Boccard.
Decorte, R. P.-J. E. 2018. The Origins of Writing, and its Relation to Art on Bronze Age Crete. PhD Dissertation, University of Cambridge.
Evans, A. J. 1894. “Primitive pictograms and a Prae-Phoenician script, from Crete and the Peloponnese.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 14: 270–372, Pl. 12
Ferrara, S., and D. Cristiani. 2016. “Il geroglifico cretese: nuovi neetodi di letura (con una nuova proposta di interpretzatione del segno 044).” Kadmos 66: 17–36.
Ferrara, S., B. Montecchi, and M. Valério. 2021. “What is the ‘Archanes Formula’? Deconstructing the reconstructing the earliest attestation of writing in the Aegean.” The Annual of the British School at Athens 116: 1–20.
Karnava, A. 2000. The Cretan Hieroglyphic Script of the Second Millennium BC: Description, Analysis, Function and Decipherment Perspectives, Volume I–II. PhD Dissertation, Université de Bruxelles.
Muti, G. 2024. “Discoid loom weights on Cyprus: New insights into textile tools and practical knowledge from the Aegean.” Levant 56.1: 50–65.
Nosch, M.-L., and A. Ulanowska. 2021. “The materiality of the Cretan Hieroglyphic script: Textile production-related referents to hieroglyphic signs on seals and sealings from Middle Bronze Age Crete.” In The Social and Cultural Contexts of Historic Writing Practices, edited by P. J. Boyes, P. M. Steele, and N. E. Astoreca (Oxbow): 73–100.
Whitworth, V. T. 2025. “The Book of Kells and eastern Pictland, revisited.” Foillseachaidhean Rannsachaidh Oilthigh Ghlaschu: 161–184.
Authors and Titles
Introduction. Civitillo, Matilde, Silvia Ferrara, and Torsten Meissner. “The Earliest Script on Crete: Semiotics, Linguistics, Archaeology and Palaeography.” 1–12.
- Ferrara, Silvia. “Cretan Hieroglyphic Sign Repertoires: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow.”
- Valério, Miguel. “Origins and Interface with Iconography.”
- Flouda, Georgia. “Cretan Hieroglyphic writing as a System of Visual Encoding: Iconicity and Graphic Communication.”
- Jasink, Anna Margherita, and Judith Weingarten. “Macro View: Uses, Social Practices and Ideological Implications of Cretan Hieroglyphic Texts.”
- Civitillo, Matilde. “Forms, Materials, and Sequences.”
- Steele, Philippa M. “Scribal Practices, Syntax and Morphology.”
- Meissner, Torsten, and Ester Salgarella. “The Relationship Between Cretan Hieroglyphic and the Other Cretan Scripts.”
- Davis, Brett. “Investigations into the Language(s) Behind Cretan Hieroglyphic and Linear A.”
- Bennet, John, and Vassilis Petrakis. “The Future of Cretan Hieroglyphs: Outlooks and Trajectories.”
Epilogue. Younger, John G.