Subject: Re: Aegean scripts: KA
From:    Bjarte Kaldhol 
Date:    Sun, 08 Sep 2002 03:59:59 +0200
To:      aegeanet@KU.EDU

Dear Listmembers,

Brian Colless wrote (inter alia):

Brian: >Nestor's cup was set down on a table in a "bronze basket" (khalkeion kaneon, with an onion, honey, and barley meal; see 9.217 for "bread in beautiful baskets"). This brought to mind my idea that the origin of the LA/LB sign for KA is the pictogram/ phonogram/ syllabogram PG 047, apparently representing a cane basket. There are about two dozen examples (CHIC, 405-406); all but two or three suspect cases have a handle at the top of the character; and half a dozen of them have cross-hatching, which I take to be the weave of the reeds. Arthur Evans (Scripta Minoa, I, 202) suggested it was a sieve or strainer (the mysterious QE might fit that identification; or it might be a cake!).

My comment: I see no similarity at all. KA is in most cases a circle circumscribing a cross, while the hieroglyphic sign is more like a sieve or strainer with a handle (as observed by Evans) see CHIC p. 406, especially the last line, and the photos of 126, 166, 176, 186, 286B, 294B, 312G on pp. 186, 206, 212, 218, 270, 276, and 288.

Brian: >In the Sumerian pictographs it represents "sheep" (UDU); it also takes the form of a square divided into four parts; this makes me think of a sheep-pen as what it might depict.

My comment: The (archaic) Sumerian UDU-sign (from c. 3000 BC) and the Minoan KA-sign are more or less identical, but different from hieroglyphic 047. For the UDU-sign, see Nissen, Damerow, Englund: ARCHAIC BOOKKEEPING, p. 21, fig. 23; it represents all kinds of sheep and goats. There is no obvious KA-sign in Cretan hieroglyphic script. The correspondences between Linear A and the hieroglyphic script are very few (the A sign, the double axe, might be one, and the SA sign perhaps another). It is therefore not unlikely that these two scripts represented different languages, as Yves Duhoux appears to believe.

Brian: >Greek kane(i)on and Latin canistrum offer themselves as a Eurasian (Indo-European) source for the acrophonogram KA. In the Chadwick-Ventris glossary I have found ka-ne-ya ("made of basketry", adjective neuter plural, = kaneia). Is there a basket noun attested yet? Of course, the language of the PG and LA inscriptions is not known, though the LB accountancy texts are definitely Eurasian, specifically Mycenean Hellenic. These LA tablets have some Afrasian (Semitic) glosses, it seems, but the few sentences on other objects may be Eurasian (Anatolian, possibly Lycian?) though not Hellenic. Anyway, I am working on the assumption that the language that produced the acrophonic pictographs of Crete was not Afrasian (Egyptian or Semitic), nor Caucasian (Hurrian), but Eurasian, possibly Anatolian Indo-Hittite, or even a language close to Latin and Greek (from a time when these two were closer to each other).

My comment: I can think of words in many languages that would explain the Linear AB acrophonogram KA, for example the Hurrian kakkare (a round bread; compare the many Minoan words ending in -are). To look for Indo-European (and even Greek!) parallels will lead us astray, since what (little) we know about Minoan Linear A, indicates that the language is very different from IE. To compare Lycian and Minoan Linear A is absurd, because Lycian as we know it, is more than a thousand years younger than Minoan (and so is Latin). When the Cretan scripts developed at the beginning of the second millennium BC, the speakers of IE Anatolian languages had barely arrived in Anatolia. Lycian inscriptions are known from 500-200 BC. Lycian did not exist when Linear A developed. It decended from a western Luwian/Luvian dialect, and as far as I can see, not even Luwian, which is closer to Linear A in time, can be related to Minoan Linear A. (If there were a relationship, it would have been fairly easy to demonstrate, and one would have expected that the several hundred Minoan names known from Linear A tablets would have been similar to Luwian and Hittite names. Also, as far as we know, there was almost no contact between the Minoans and their Anatolian neighbours in the form of written correspondence. If the Minoans were related to the Hittites and the Luwians, wouldn't we have expected frequent diplomatic exchanges? Have any Hittite letters ever been found on Crete? Is Minoan Crete ever mentioned in Hittite sources?)

Hurrian, by the way, is probably not a Caucasian language. It originated in eastern Anatolia and the northern Tigris area.

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