Minoan Stone Vessels with Linear a Inscriptions

By B. Davis

Inscribed Minoan stone vessels are ritual gifts that index theirdedicants' intention that both their gift and their name should survivepermanently at the place of dedication. These vessels containedofferings, yet the vessels themselves were also offerings, serving aspermanent records of a ritual act. These rituals were most likelycommunal, incorporating group feasting and drinking. The seasonality ofthese rituals suggests that they were focused on the cycle of life: fertility, birth, death and renewal. Offerings left with the vesselssuggest that these rituals also addressed other, more personal concerns.As for Linear A itself: the language behind the script appears tocontain a fairly standard phonemic inventory, though there are hints ofadditional, more exotic phonemes. The morphology of the language appearsto involve affixation, a typical mode of inflection in human languages.The presence of significant prefixing tends to rule out PIE as a parentlanguage, while the word-internal vowel alternations typical ofAfroasiatic verbal inflection are nowhere to be found in this script. Inthe end, Linear A appears most likely to represent a non-IE, non-Afroasiatic language, perhaps with agglutinative tendencies, andperhaps with VSO word order.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 9042930977
• ISBN13: 9789042930971
• Release Date: June 2014
• Publisher: Peeters
• Length: 445 Pages
• Weight: 4.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 8.2" x 11.5"