Bronze Age Crete produced more than one writing system. They are related, but they are not the same, and visitors confuse them constantly. This page lays out what each script is, how they connect, and where Linear A actually sits in the sequence.
The short version: an older script, Cretan Hieroglyphic, appears first. Linear A arrives later and the two run side by side for roughly two centuries. Linear B is a still-later adaptation of Linear A that writes Greek. And the famous Phaistos Disc is something else again — a one-off in its own sign-set. So Linear A is one of the oldest writing systems in Europe, but not the oldest: Cretan Hieroglyphic comes before it.
Very early sequence on a small set of seal stones. May be ancestral to both Cretan Hieroglyphic and Linear A. Too sparse to read.
The oldest of the developed scripts. Pictographic; mostly on seals and sealings. Undeciphered.
The Minoan administrative and ritual script, c. 1800–1450 BCE. The focus of this site. Undeciphered.
A later adaptation of Linear A used to write Greek. Deciphered by Michael Ventris in 1952.
A single stamped clay disc with its own unique signs. Not Linear A. Undeciphered, and probably undecipherable.
The rest of this page takes them one at a time.
The earliest of Crete’s developed writing systems is Cretan Hieroglyphic, a pictographic script used mainly on seals and seal impressions in the north and east of the island — around Knossos, Mallia, and Petras. It is the script that appears first, which is why Linear A cannot claim to be the oldest writing in Europe.
Crucially, Cretan Hieroglyphic and Linear A overlapped in time for about two centuries. They were not successive stages so much as different centers writing at the same moment — Hieroglyphic in the north and east, Linear A spreading through the south and center. Some signs are shared between the two, and both may descend from a common ancestor (the Archanes signs). Cretan Hieroglyphic remains undeciphered.
“Oldest writing in Europe” is a claim people often attach to Linear A. It is safer to say Linear A is one of the oldest. Cretan Hieroglyphic is older, and the two coexisted.
Older still, in a sense, is a short sequence of signs found on a handful of early seal stones — usually called the Archanes script or sequence, after the cemetery where examples were found. It is sometimes treated as a possible common ancestor of both Cretan Hieroglyphic and Linear A: a shared starting point from which the later scripts diverged.
The material is too sparse to read or to settle the question. It is best understood as a clue to where Cretan writing may have begun, not as a script we can analyze in its own right.
Linear A is the primary writing system of Minoan Crete, in use for roughly four centuries. It served two very different purposes: administration — tablets listing commodities, people, and transactions — and ritual, in the form of a repeated formula inscribed on stone vessels at mountain sanctuaries.
We can read the numerals and sound out many of the signs, but the underlying language is unknown. Among the few words we are genuinely confident about are the accounting terms ku-ro (“total”), ki-ro (a balance owed or deficit), and po-to-ku-ro (a grand total). Beyond a small handful like these, the meanings are open.
This is the script the rest of this site is about; everything else on this page is context.
Linear B is the easy one to explain. When Mycenaean Greeks took control of Knossos around 1450 BCE, they adapted the Minoan sign inventory to write their own language — early Greek. A large share of Linear B signs come straight from Linear A. The scripts are related; the languages are not. Michael Ventris deciphered Linear B in 1952, and it is the chain back through Greek that lets us assign sound-values to Linear A signs in the first place.
The Phaistos Disc is the outlier. Found at the Palace of Phaistos, it is a fired clay disc carrying signs stamped in a spiral with individual reusable punches — a technique found nowhere else in Cretan writing, which is otherwise incised or painted. Its sign-set is its own: pictographic, and unlike Linear A’s. The Phaistos Disc is not Linear A.
And it cannot be read, for a simple reason: no other inscription in its script has ever been found. With Linear A there are well over a thousand inscriptions — enough to look for patterns and recurring words. With the disc there is a sample of one. The disc is famous because it is mysterious; Linear A is tractable because it is abundant.