Artemis Karnava CAARI lecture

Cretan and Cypriot writing in the 2nd & 1st millennia BC: on seeing and believing
The 2nd millennium BC societies of the lands that are nowadays called Greece and Cyprus made use of a series of writing systems that we think were inter-related. We know today of a total of four writing systems belonging to the Cypro-Aegean script family, namely the Cretan Hieroglyphic, Linear A and Linear B spreading from Crete to the Greek mainland, and Cypro-Minoan in Cyprus. The latter survived, rather exceptionally, well into the 1st millennium BC in Cyprus, and is known to us as the Cypriot syllabary. The Cypro-Aegean script family consists therefore of five scripts in total and spans a little less than two millennia, after which they fell into oblivion. There are many known, as well as unknown aspects of this kinship system that existed, and we have been exploring them for a little over a hundred years. This presentation will lay out what we know and what we are still missing, and it will focus on a primal aspect of their existence, namely on how people were inspired to create them, and what were the social circumstances at around those times.