Linear A has a younger relative, and that relative was deciphered. Its name is Linear B. Understanding the relationship between the two is the single most important thing for grasping what we can — and cannot — say about Linear A.
The short version: Linear B was built out of Linear A’s signs, roughly 350 years later, to write a different language. That later script was read in 1952. Because the shapes carried over, the reading of Linear B lets us put sounds to Linear A. But sounds are not meaning — and that gap is the whole story.
Around 1450 BCE, Linear A went out of use across Crete. Shortly afterwards, Linear B appears at Knossos — written by Mycenaean Greek-speakers who had taken over the palace and borrowed the older script’s signs to write their own language, an early form of Greek.
The great majority of Linear B signs come directly from Linear A. Whoever did this kept the shapes and changed the language underneath — much as the Latin alphabet was later adapted to write Turkish, Finnish, and Vietnamese. The scripts are related. The languages are not.
Linear B was famously deciphered by Michael Ventris in 1952, working with the philologist John Chadwick. The breakthrough proved that the language behind it was an early form of Greek.
That single fact changes everything, because Greek runs in an unbroken line from then to now — through ancient, medieval, and modern Greek. Once you know the words are Greek, you have a known grammar, a known vocabulary, and a known sound system to check every sign against. The reading could be verified, not merely proposed.
Here is the move at the heart of every Linear A reading. Many Linear A signs look like Linear B signs — the same shapes were inherited. So we take the sound that Linear B sign carries and transfer it back onto its Linear A look-alike. That is how we can read a Linear A tablet aloud at all.
This is a careful reconstruction, not a guess — each step rests on the verified reading of Linear B. But it is still a reconstruction, and it is not certain. And there is a harder limit: some Linear A signs have no Linear B counterpart. The sign known as *301 is one of them — nothing in Linear B matches it, so its sound is simply unknown. We number it and move on.
This is the point that trips people up. Linear B could be deciphered because its language turned out to be Greek — something already known. Linear A records an unknown language with no confirmed relatives, so the same trick does not work twice.
You can borrow Linear B’s sounds and read a Linear A word out loud, and still have no idea what it means. We are confident about a tiny handful of words — ku-ro for “total,” ki-ro for “deficit,” po-to-ku-ro for “grand total” — mostly because of where they sit in account lists, not because we cracked the language. Everywhere else, knowing the sound leaves the meaning open.