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Three lines, two numbers

This is HT 92, a clay tablet from Haghia Triada. Three lines. Six traced signs. Two numbers. No ku-ro, so there is nothing to add up, which makes it the shortest walk on this site and, by a wide margin, the one that carries the largest number.

The object

Found in Casa Room 7. Heraklion Museum, number 1324. Younger gives it to HT Scribe 2 and notes two vacant lines below the text.

Photograph of tablet HT 92
Tablet HT 92, the object. Photograph: lineara.xyz mirror. Published here for this document under a permission request. Image rights largely Ecole Francaise d'Athenes.

The tracing

A person drew the strokes from the object. Every crop below is cut from this drawing.

Tracing of HT 92
Tablet HT 92, the tracing. Sign drawings from SigLA: The Signs of Linear A, a palaeographical database, by Ester Salgarella and Simon Castellan (https://sigla.phis.me/), licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

The signs, one by one

Line 1 is te and a divider: a heading. Line 2 is a-du, a divider, and the grain logogram (AB120, GRA in the Linear B convention) with its number. Line 3 is the sign *304 with its number. The tracing has six crops, and the grain sign is there twice; the sign-by-sign text has it once. Two layers of data, one disagreement, both shown.

  1. Sign AB04 te, HT 92, position 1 AB04 te
  2. Sign AB08 a, HT 92, position 2 AB08 a
  3. Sign AB51 du, HT 92, position 3 AB51 du
  4. Sign AB120 GRA, HT 92, position 4 AB120 GRA
  5. Sign AB120 GRA, HT 92, position 5 AB120 GRA
  6. Sign A304, HT 92, position 6 A304
The signs of HT 92 in reading order, each one cropped from the tracing. The label under each crop is the catalogue number and, where one is agreed, the sound value.

The numbers

Grain 680. Then *304 12. That is the whole tablet, and by the standards of this corpus, where a whole wine list can come to less, 680 of anything is a large entry.

  1. line 1 te AB04|
  2. line 2 a AB08du AB51|GRA AB120680
  3. line 3 A30412
Every line of HT 92 as text. Numerals are added up and shown as digits. A question mark is a damaged sign. A bar is a word divider.

What everybody agrees on

A heading-and-quantity record: te, then a-du, then grain and a number, then *304 and a number, with no names in between and no total at the end. Younger lists it among the tablets where a-du is the heading, in the form te, a-du, GRA. Schoep's typology files it under mixed commodities.

What is disputed

What a-du means. The mirror record offers "assessment?", question mark included. Younger's notes treat it as a transaction heading and stop short of a gloss. And what *304 is. The mirror record says olive oil. Younger's notes say a common agricultural product that accompanies grain here, and do not say oil. This site says: an agricultural commodity, identity uncertain.

Photograph against tracing

Drag the curtain and judge the tracing yourself.

The comparator needs JavaScript. The layers are the photograph, the facsimile, the tracing of HT 92, registered into one frame.
Photograph against tracing for HT 92. Drag the curtain. The layers were registered offline; the browser computes no geometry.

Credits

Tracing: SigLA, Ester Salgarella and Simon Castellan, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Photograph: as captioned above. Readings and commentary: John G. Younger, Linear A Texts and Inscriptions in phonetic transcription and Commentary (2024), quoted in short. Findspot and museum number: the lineara.xyz record, which draws on GORILA (Godart and Olivier, 1976 to 1985). Typology: Schoep 2002.

The full record of HT 92

Four more

The same walk for four other objects from Haghia Triada.