Linear A did not appear out of nowhere, and it was not the only script on the island. To place it, you need the wider Bronze Age frame — and the scripts that came before, beside, and after it.
What follows is a chronological walk through that frame, in order. The dates are all approximate: scholars work with periods rather than calendar years, and an “about” or a “~” is doing real work in front of every figure below.
The Cretan Bronze Age is divided into Middle Minoan (MM) and Late Minoan (LM) phases, each split further into numbered and lettered sub-stages — MM IA, MM IB, MM II, and on into LM I and LM IB. These are relative periods built from pottery styles and stratigraphy; the absolute dates attached to them are approximate and still argued over.
The turning points that matter for writing line up with the palaces. The first palaces — Knossos, Phaistos, Mallia — were built around 1900 BCE, and palatial administration is what created the need for record-keeping in the first place. Around 1700 BCE these “old” palaces were destroyed, by earthquake or conflict, and rebuilt grander. The deepest break comes around 1450 BCE, in the phase called LM IB.
The earliest writing on Crete is not Linear A but Cretan Hieroglyphic, which emerges around 2100 BCE. It is a pictographic script, found mainly on seals and seal impressions, and it is centred on the north and east of the island — Knossos, Mallia, and Petras. It remains undeciphered.
This is why Linear A is described as one of the oldest writing systems in Europe rather than the oldest: Cretan Hieroglyphic comes first. The two scripts share some signs, and both may descend from a common ancestor — the sparse Arkhanes script on a handful of seal stones from the Phourni cemetery.
Linear A appears soon after Cretan Hieroglyphic, around 1800 BCE, and is at first dominant in the south and centre of Crete — at Phaistos and Haghia Triada. For roughly 200 years the two scripts run side by side. Scholars (Schoep) read this overlap as representing different political centres rather than different eras — Cretan Hieroglyphic in the north and east, Linear A in the south and centre.
Around 1700 BCE, when the old palaces fall and are rebuilt, Cretan Hieroglyphic fades out and Linear A becomes the island-wide standard. A few late objects carry both scripts at once, a sign of the handover.
Linear A's working life runs roughly from 1800 to 1450 BCE. It served the palace economy — the everyday accounting of grain, oil, wine, sheep, and cloth — and it carried the ritual offering formula found at sanctuaries across Crete. Most of the administrative clay survives only by accident: it was sun-dried, not baked, and was hardened by the fires that later destroyed the buildings.
Those fires came around 1450 BCE. In the phase known as LM IB, Minoan centres across the island were destroyed, with Knossos the major survivor. After this widespread destruction, Linear A largely ends.
Soon after Linear A goes out of use, Linear B develops. Mycenaean Greek-speakers took the Minoan sign inventory and adapted it to write their own language — early Greek. The two scripts are successive at Knossos, not concurrent: the earliest Linear B appears at Knossos, and later on the mainland from about 1400 BCE onward. Linear B was deciphered by Michael Ventris in 1952, which is why we can read its Greek — and why we can sound out the related Linear A signs without understanding the language beneath them.
Linear B itself disappeared around 1200 BCE with the collapse of the Bronze Age palaces. Then writing vanishes from the Greek world for centuries. When it returns, around 800 BCE, it is a wholly new system — the alphabet, borrowed from Phoenician — with no descent from Linear B at all.