Ninety Signs In Common: What Linear A and Linear B Share, and What They Do Not

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Roughly seventy percent of Linear A's signs reappear in Linear B, which is exactly why the relationship between the two scripts is so well established even though one of them remains completely unread. When Mycenaean Greeks began administering Crete, they seem to have taken over Linear A's existing sign shapes rather than invent a new script from nothing, but they assigned many of those signs new phonetic values fitted to Greek, added some signs Linear A did not have, and dropped others. The result is a script that looks like a close cousin of Linear A at a glance and reads completely differently in practice. This is also exactly why Linear A cannot simply be read using Linear B's values: a shared sign shape between the two scripts is no guarantee of a shared sound, since the Mycenaean adapters were free to repurpose signs however suited their own language. Linear B tablets, once deciphered, turned out to record dry palace administration, inventories of grain, wool, and labor rather than literature or history. Whether Linear A, when it was actively used for Minoan administration a few centuries earlier, served a similarly narrow bureaucratic purpose, or something broader, is one more question its undeciphered status leaves open.