cretan hieroglyphics and the parallel desk

There are fewer than 350 Cretan hieroglyphic inscriptions. They were cut into seals, clay bars, medallions, and a four-sided prism class that scholars label CHIC P. The script is logo-syllabic. It has not been read.

It ran from roughly 2100 BCE to 1700 BCE on Crete. For most of that span it was used alongside Linear A. The two systems were not sequential. They overlapped for around two centuries.

Linear A and Cretan hieroglyphic appear in the same buildings. Quartier Mu at Malia is the clearest case. Excavators found both scripts in the same workshop complex, in some cases in adjacent rooms, in at least one case in the same deposit. The working assumption is that the same scribes used both.

Two systems. Same desks. Different purposes that nobody can now name.

The CHIC corpus (Corpus Hieroglyphicarum Inscriptionum Cretae, Olivier and Godart, 1996) catalogues 314 documents. Seals and sealings dominate. There are also clay bars, cones, and medallions. The four-sided prisms carry signs on each face. Reading order on the prisms is unresolved. You can begin on any face. The text closes on itself.

I have been looking at the prism CHIC #294. It is steatite. Four sides. Each side carries between three and five signs. One side has been polished smooth by handling so that two signs are illegible. The catalogue records this as "abraded by use." The other two faces are sharp.

The signs that recur most often across the corpus are catalogued by number. Sign 044 is the so-called "gate." Sign 070 is the "eye." Sign 019 is a small bent figure that has been described as a left hand. The hand sign appears 38 times in the corpus. On 31 of those occurrences it is oriented with the thumb on the viewer's right, which would make it a left hand seen palm-out. The other 7 are reversed.

Linear A and Cretan hieroglyphic share some signs. Not many. Estimates run between 15 and 20 percent overlap depending on who is counting. The shared signs do not necessarily carry the same values. A sign that is syllabic in Linear A may be logographic in hieroglyphic. The systems are not transliterations of each other. They are parallel.

What I keep coming back to is the desk. A scribe at Malia, sometime around 1850 BCE, sitting in a room in Quartier Mu, with two scripts available. They chose one for some documents and the other for others. The choice was not arbitrary. It cannot have been arbitrary, because they maintained both for two hundred years. But the rule that governed the choice is not visible in what survives.

I made a list of the documents from Quartier Mu where both scripts appear in the same deposit. There are seven such deposits in the published record. I counted them twice.

One of the four-sided prisms in the corpus, CHIC #292, has signs on three faces only. The fourth face is blank. The blank face is not damaged. It was left blank when the prism was carved. The catalogue notes this without comment.

I have not found a published explanation for the blank face. I have looked.