Critique of Decipherments by Hubert La Marle and
Kjell Aartun
- inaugural date: 15 August 2009; last
update: 5 July 2010
-
Comments, corrections, questions: John Younger (jyounger@ku.edu)
Back to the Linear A homepage.
La Marle
What follows is a brief critique of Hubert La Marle's presumed
decipherment of Linear A as Indo-Iranian / Sanskrit, in 4 vols.
- La Marle, Hubert. 1996 (reprinted 1999). Linéaire A. La
première écriture syllabique de Crète. Essai de
lecture. Paris: Librairie Orientaliste Paul Geuthner.
- La Marle, Hubert. 1997. Linéaire A. La première
écriture syllabique de Crète. Éléments de
grammaire. Paris: Librairie Orientaliste Paul Geuthner.
- La Marle, Hubert. 1998. Linéaire A. L'histoire et la
view de la Crète minoenne. Textes commentés.
Paris: Librairie Orientaliste Paul Geuthner.
- La Marle, Hubert. 1999. Linéaire A. La première
écriture syllabique de Crète. Signes rares, textes brefs,
substitutions. Paris: Librairie Orientaliste Paul Geuthner.
- Also: La
Marle's website
- La Marle, Hubert. 1996 (reprinted 1999). Linéaire A. La
première écriture syllabique de Crète. Essai de
lecture. Paris: Librairie Orientaliste Paul Geuthner.
- Introduction (7-11): lay-out of the study
- Bibliography (13-29)
- "Essai de lecture" (33-131): a discussion of each LA sign, comparing
its graphic shape with similar signs in other writing systems of the
eastern Mediterranean (Cypro-Minoan, Cypro-Syllabic, Hurrian, Hittite,
Proto-Sinaitic, Phoenician, Egyptian Hieroglyphic, Proto-Canaanite, South
Arabic, Mineo-Sabeen, Ethiopian, Amharic, etc.), which he characterizes as
forming a "famille graphique."
Each discussion concludes with a nuanced
phonetic value for the sign.
- Summary (108-110)
- Discussion of the pronunciation of the various vowels & consonants
(111-131)
- JGY comments
- Contrary to the subtitle, Cretan Hieroglyphic is actually the first
syllabic writing system in
Crete.
Godart 1984 demonstrated that 7 (possibly 8) complex words (3 or
more syllables) appear in both Linear A & B, and that therefore 12 signs
have the same values in Linear B and A (DA, I, JA, KI, PA, PI, RO, RI, SE,
SU, TA, O): RI & TA are two of those, but HLM assigns them completely
different values (y/ye and s (th/z), respectively).
HLM derives phonetic values for Linear A signs based on their
similarities with signs in various eastern Mediterranean and northeast
African scripts (see above) as if such similarities constituted a
demonstration that Linear A derived from those scripts --
similarities in the shape of written signs may not indicate similarities
of phonetic value, even when it can be demonstrated that one script
derived from another (e.g., Cyrilic from Greek, but Russian H [/n/] is not
pronounced like Greek H [/ē/]).
HLM also assigns phonetic values to several ideograms (VIR, GRA,
OLIV, OLE, VIN, etc.), of which only VIR & VIN seem to operate also as
syllabograms.
Instead, Linear A probably derives many if not most of its signs
from Cretan Hieroglyphic, which HLM occasionally mentions but whose
relaltionship to Linear A he does not discuss at all. Most signs in Cretan
Hieroglyphic are pictographs, whose names or sounds or other qualities may
have determined the phonetic values (e.g., LinA 23 
from CH *012
, bull
head, "mu"; LinA 60 
from CH *018 
, dog head, "ra").
- La Marle, Hubert. 1997. Linéaire A. La première
écriture syllabique de Crète. Éléments de
grammaire. Paris: Librairie Orientaliste Paul Geuthner.
- Introduction (7-12): HLM lays out the 11 criteria set out by Y. Duhoux
for establishing a decipherment (corpus of texts, a syllabary, phonetic
values, orthography, morphology, etc.) and asserts he is following all of
these.
- Concordance (13-20) of signs between GORILA and Raison-Pope, Corpus
transnuméré.
- Maps (192-195)
- Index & Abbreviations (197-199)
- Elements of grammar (23-191)
HLM reads (47)
- a) a-s-i-rai-ro-ja
- b) wo-ru-sa / mu-lu-nwi / i-tar
- c) a / mu-na-kh-na ra / i
- d) pi-na-pha / ra-ru-te
- La Marle, Hubert. 1998. Linéaire A. L'histoire et la view de
la Crète minoenne. Textes commentés. Paris: Librairie
Orientaliste Paul Geuthner.
- HLM translates KO Za 1 into Indo-Iranian/Sanskrit (280)
-
- JGY stops here because
- HLM does not analyze Linear A's structure before attempting a
translation.
- Instead, he
- For words that do not translate comfortably, HLM suggests religious
meanings, names of otherwise unknown divinities and rites, and produces a
translation that makes difficult sense.
- cf. Duhoux, Companion to Linear B (2008), pp.
349-61, where he criticizes the recent translations of the new Theban
texts
because they introduce a religious interpretation of words simply because
they are imperfectly understood.
Aatun
Aartun, Kjell.
1992. Die minoische Schrift: Sprache und Texte. 1: Der Diskos von
Phaistos, die beschriftete Bronze axt, die Inschrift der Tarragona-Tafel.
Wiesbaden: Harassowitz.
1997. Die Minoische Schrift Sprache und Texte. 2: Linear
A-Inschriften. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.
I will not deal with Aartun's treatment of the Phaistos Disc (which he
translates as a sexual magic text; for an English translation of some
lines, click here), the
Arkalokhori ax, and a painted (?) clay (?) plaque now in the Madrid Museum
and conventionally dated to the 4th c. BCE -- except to point out that he
identifies the pictographs (e.g., the head with the "Mohawk" hair is a
"priest" which is kahinu in Semitic and therefore the sign has the
phonetic value of ka [at the beginning] and ak [at the end
of words]). In other words, Aartun uses the acrophonic principle once he
has determined what the sign "is."
For Linear A, he says he accepts most of the standard identification of
phonetic values (1: 46-53), following Brice 1961 and GORILA, but in the
long discussion of individual texts (1: 53-121), he identifies Linear A
words as words in various languages (the vocabulary index, pp. 805-40
lists, among others: Ugaritic, Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Ethiopian, and
Akkadian), forcing many syllabograms to take on new phonetic values (this
will be made clear in the following section).
His sign chart (1: 122-23) keeps some of the standard phonetic
identifications, but to transcribe his Semitic identifications he assigns
phonetic values to
rare Linear A signs (both GORILA and Brice) in order to supply phonetic
values that do not exist in GORILA's grid -- for example, in the deficient
O-series:
Brice 15 [usually a variant on GORILA 11] for DO, Brice 75 for JO, 302 for
MO, 28 for NO, Brice 12 for QO, and 319 for WO). Aartun also invents three
H-series, 2
z-series (z- and z- with a dot under it), a y-series (57=YA [JA] but the
rest are new), a second d-series (d- with a line under it), and
alternative
open vowels (A-U, all preceded by ').
For example of his method, I take (at random) Aartun's discussion of HT 13
(this continues over several pages, 1: 57-58, 80-87; 2: 78-80).
First, here is GORILA's transcription and my normalized version:
HT 13
| 1-2: | 77-10-45-59 131a 04 | |
| 2: | 27-17 | 5[] J[] |
| 3: | 04-69 | 56 |
| 3-4: | 04-67 | 27 J |
| .4: | 81-79-30 | 18 |
| .5: | 01-41-*118 | 19 |
| .5-6: | 28-51-24-41 | 5 |
| .7: | 81-02 | 130 J |
Aartun reads only some of the signs on p. 1: 57 (other signs on HT 13 are
discussed on 1: 58, and 80-87), forcing some signs to take on new phonetic
values to suit his identification of the Semitic word he thinks the Linear
A
inscription is trying to spell.
I present only the section on p. 1: 57 to give a sample of what he is
doing (I give a photo of this section since it includes a lot of
diacritical marks unavailable to the web; L-sign numbers are
Brice, those in () are GORILA's):
has not any means of subsistence."
Apparently Aartun feels free to take the Linear A word and change it to
suit a Semitic word.
Vol 2 discusses the Linear A texts, text by text. HT 13 is again discussed
on pp. 2: 78-80. Here is Aartun's complete presentation and translation (I
omit the commentary, which basically duplicates 1:57-58 etc.):
I give an English translation of his German (many thanks to Sabine
Beckmann!):
| .1: | he who lives in a wretched state/his life |
| .1-2: | prepared (food) |
| .2: | tot(al) |
| .2: | poor (person) / (person) under protection (of the
prince)
|
| .2: | 5 J |
| .3: | the fool [low-class?]
56 |
| .3: | very much the fool [low-class?] |
| .4: | 27 J |
| .4: | (person) who drinks uninterruptedly without slurping
|
| .4: | 17 J |
| .5: | s/he who does not grow |
| .5-6: | food/fare [or provisions] of the destitute [without
means]/poor people
|
| .6: | 5 |
| .7: | total 130 J |
Needless to say, this translation makes little sense and does not suit a
presumed administrative purpose for this text.
I can't really follow Aartun's method, for it is circular, taking up a
text, changing the phonetic values to suit a Semitic reading for the
words, and then refining the produced Semitic text. There is no internal
analysis of the Linear A texts, no assumption of what the texts should
resemble (in
his section on the cultural context, 1: 24-25, he talks of a "Feudal- und
theokratisches System," but does not mention Minoan administration).
Instead, Aartun assumes that Linear A is writing Semitic and that a
substitution of Semitic words for the Linear A words (contorted to fit)
suffices for a decipherment.
Comments, corrections, questions: John
Younger
Back to the Linear A homepage.