AbstractsHistory

The aim of this dissertation is to advance our knowledge of Cypro-Minoan, a group of undeciphered syllabic inscriptions dated roughly to the 16th or 15th through the 11th centuries BCE and found mostly on Cyprus, with small numbers of documents from coastal Syria and Tiryns (Peloponnese). Two recently-published collections of inscriptions (Olivier 2007; Ferrara 2012 and 2013) have facilitated greatly the investigation of Cypro-Minoan, but the field is still missing a comprehensive paleographical study of the script and a definitive sign-list on which most scholars can agree. Albeit being now the main reference, Olivier’s sign repertory of 96 syllabograms is structured upon É. Masson’s (1974) division of Cypro-Minoan into three “subscripts” (CM 1, 2 and 3), supposedly created and used for different languages, a scheme which has come under criticism. It remains uncertain whether the Cypro-Minoan documents contain one or multiple writing systems. Together with the size of the corpus (almost 4,000 signs on fewer than 250 inscriptions), these lacunae greatly reduce the chances of decipherment. The present work intends to demonstrate that Cypro-Minoan in fact presents some advantages that open prospects for elucidating the script and that a methodology that is well-adjusted to them may contribute to improve our understanding of the inscriptions. Therefore, the goal of this thesis is twofold: (1) to establish a signary that identifies individual Cypro-Minoan signs and defines their paleographical variation to a fine degree of accuracy; and (2) to investigate the possible sounds represented by these signs. The second objective is achieved by means of a three-step methodology. The first two steps comprise, on one hand, cross-comparisons between the Cypro-Minoan signs (in terms of form and value) and signs attested in related scripts, namely Linear A and the Cypriot Greek syllabary; on the other hand and independently, internal analyses (positional distribution and frequency, alternations of related signs as a result of morphological activity, and scribal hesitations). The sound values proposed through these two methods are then tested by a third, which consists of provisionally transliterating a limited set of Cypro-Minoan inscriptions, to ascertain whether they yield readings corresponding to linguistic data known from external sources, therefore validating the hypothetical sign values and possibly even proposing new ones. While a cogent decipherment is not the scope of this project, two main objectives are achieved. The first is to offer a revised list of Cypro-Minoan signs, not framed within the traditional division, but based on selected homogeneous subcorpora of inscriptions, with no preconceived bias as to the number of script varieties represented. It is argued that Cypro-Minoan contains between 57 and 70 different syllabograms, depending on the validity of a number of proposed assimilations of signs that possibly are mere allographs. Secondly, phonetic values are proposed for 60 of these sign forms: nine are…