The Accountant We Can't Read Linear A: reading a lost script's arithmetic, not its words

We can voice it. We cannot read it.

Linear A is the writing of Minoan Crete, in use from about 1800 to 1450 BC. Around 1450 BC the Mycenaean Greeks borrowed its signs to write their language; that adaptation is Linear B, and in 1952 Michael Ventris cracked it — because a known language, Greek, sat behind it (the full story is in The Grid That Spoke Greek). Because Linear B grew out of Linear A, scholars lend each Linear A sign the sound of its Linear B look-alike. So we can pronounce Linear A. Here is its most-repeated text, a formula carved on stone offering tables across the island:

That is the whole trick and the whole trap. Reading a sign because it looks like a Linear B sign assumes it sounds like it too — and the sounds may have drifted when the script was borrowed. The transliteration has, in the words of Mnamon, Scuola Normale Superiore, “an essentially conventional value, since in most cases it is impossible to say whether the homomorphic syllabograms were also homophones.” The result reads aloud and means nothing. The language behind Linear A is unknown. So: read but not understood. Except — for one corner of it.

The numbers need no language

A tally is a tally in any tongue. Linear A counts in a plain decimal system — one mark per power of ten, repeated, and the orders added together. We don't have to know what the scribe called fifty-six to know that it is fifty-six:

Halves and smaller portions get their own signs. In 2021, a Bologna team (Corazza, Ferrara, Montecchi, Tamburini & Valério) proposed a systematic assignment of their values with a computational, statistical and typological model, building on earlier work. The model narrowed the possibilities under stated constraints; some assignments remain tentative. The securest of all, and the only fraction we'll lean on below, is J = ½. The numbers, then, are legible. Which means a column of them can be checked.

The column that checks itself

Most Linear A tablets are accounts: lists of entries, each with a number. Some totalling accounts end with one recurring word, KU-RO, followed by a final figure. Add the entries. The sum equals that final figure. Do it on enough tablets and the meaning of the word falls out with no language at all: KU-RO means “total.” Here is the simplest case — probably six people, each owing a single unit, under the heading KI-RO, “owed”:

Six ones, total six. You just read a word of a dead language off pure addition — the same way the word was first read. As the Linear B co-decipherer John Chadwick put it, quoted in a conference abstract, “The meaning of one Linear A word is certain: ku-ro… must mean something like ‘total’ or ‘so much’.” Wikipedia calls it “the most secure” word in the script, because it precedes “a numeral representing the sum of the tallies in the list.”

Here are four consignments of OLIV — olives, a logogram we can read because the same little leafy-twig sign survived into Linear B — summed across a real olive account, fractions and all:

A note on what's readable here: the numbers and the commodity pictures (olives, wine, figs, grain, a man) are secure — the pictures because they passed into the deciphered Linear B. The words in the left column, RE-ZA, KI-TA-I, SA-RU, are only sounded out by Linear B values and mean nothing to us; they may be names of people or places in a lost tongue. We can read the ledger's math and its goods, never its people.

The half that does not balance

If the sums always landed, you might suspect us of fitting the meaning to the result. They don't always land — and that is the strongest thing on this page. Take HT 13, the famous wine tablet. Add its six entries:

The entries come to 131. The scribe wrote KU-RO 130½. The recorded total is short by a half, as the editor of the corpus notes: “KU-RO here records 130.5, but the numbers total 131.” His note does not say why. HT 122 balances: its PO-TO-KU-RO, the “grand total,” includes two sub-totals and a separate KU-DA 1: 31 + 65 + 1 = 97:

Think about what catching that requires. You can only find a discrepancy in arithmetic you can actually follow. On HT 13 we can compare an intended total with its entries, even though the language is lost. A half-unit discrepancy in an account about 3,500 years old is still legible across that language barrier. We can audit the addition without knowing what caused the mismatch.

The same arithmetic gives a second word its meaning, by opposition: where KU-RO is what a list comes to, KI-RO is what is still owed — the deficit. Two words, total and deficit, both deciphered by counting.

Why everything else stays dark

Numbers, commodity-pictures, and a handful of accounting words — KU-RO, KI-RO, PO-TO-KU-RO — are very nearly the whole of what we securely hold. The language is unknown and unclassified, with no demonstrated relative, and certainly not Greek. Scholars are plain about it:

“the language written in Linear A remains unknown.”Encyclopædia Britannica

“at the moment we can ‘read’ the Linear A script but we still cannot understand it.”Ester Salgarella, Cambridge (creator of the SigLA database)

The proof that it's unread isn't only the silence; it's the noise. A century of competing “decipherments” has assigned Linear A to many languages of the ancient world, without an accepted solution:

When every key opens a different door, no key fits. The wall has three honest names: no bilingual (no Rosetta Stone), a tiny corpus of short documents (about 1,400, most only a few signs), and no proven relative to lean a guess against. Even the machines hit it. In 1974 David Packard published his computer study of Linear A, with a telling control: nine fictitious decipherments, the Linear B sound-values shuffled at random onto the signs, to test whether the “real” reading was statistically any less meaningless. A 2019 neural model recovered cognates in the already deciphered Linear B and Ugaritic, correctly translating 67.3% of the Linear B cognates tested. That model requires a known relative; Linear A has none.

That is the exact shape of the boundary. Linear B fell because structure carried you to an anchor and a known language waited behind it. Linear A offers the same structure and the same anchors — the accounts even hand you KU-RO for free — but the language behind the anchor is lost, and structure alone was never enough to raise it. We are left with the strangest of inheritances: a people's bookkeeping, perfectly auditable, their names and their words and their gods sounding in our mouths and meaning nothing. We can read the accountant. We cannot read the man.

The other face of the silence: the libation formula at the top recurs on dozens of altars, and A-SA-SA-RA-ME, a recurring element, has been guessed to be a goddess's name. Guessed. We don't even know if it names a god.