Cretan hieroglyphs

Cretan hieroglyphs are a hieroglyphic writing system used in early Bronze Age Crete, during the Minoan era. They predate Linear A by about a century, but the two writing systems continued to be used in parallel for most of their history. As of 2025, they are undeciphered.
As of 1989, the corpus of Cretan hieroglyphic inscriptions included two parts:
More documents, such as those from the Petras deposit, have been published since then. A four sided prism was found in 2011 at Vrysinas in western Crete.
These inscriptions were mainly excavated at four locations:
The first corpus of signs was published by Evans in 1909. The current corpus (which excludes some of Evan's signs) was published in 1996 as the Corpus Hieroglyphicarum Inscriptionum Cretae (CHIC). It consists of:
The relation of the last two items with the script of the main corpus is uncertain; the Malia altar is listed as part of the Hieroglyphic corpus by most researchers.
Since the publication of the CHIC in 1996 refinements and changes have been proposed. The main issue is that a number of symbols found on sealstones, tending to be more image-based, were deemed as purely decorative and not included in the sign list (or are transcribed when read). The concern is that this process may have resulted in actual signs being deprecated.
Some Cretan Hieroglyphic (as well as Linear A) inscriptions were also found on the island of Samothrace in the northeastern Aegean.
Some scholars have suggested relations to Anatolian hieroglyphs:
New exemplars continue to be found. During recent excavation at the Neopalatial area of the Cult Centre of the City of Knossos a seal stone was found in a foundation deposit. The steatite seal had four inscribed faces and the deposit dated to Final Palatial Period into LM III B. The room where the deposit was found had a "religious sceptre" inscribed all over with Linear A.
At Zakros three sealings inscribed with Cretan hieroglyphs were found in the same deposit with a Linear A tablet and a Linear A inscribed roundel. The deposit was in a destruction layer dated between layers LM IA and LM IB.
Symbol inventories have been compiled by Evans (1909), Meijer (1982), and Olivier & Godart (1996).
The glyph inventory in CHIC includes 96 syllabograms representing sounds, ten of which double as logograms, representing words or portions of words.
There are also 23 logograms representing four levels of numerals (units, tens, hundreds, thousands), nine signs for numerical fractions, and two types of punctuation.
Many symbols have apparent Linear A counterparts, so that it is tempting to insert Linear B sound values. Moreover, there are multiple parallels (words and phrases) from hieroglyphic inscriptions that occur also in Linear A and/or B in similar contexts (words for "total", toponyms, personal names etc.)
It has been suggested that several signs were influenced by Egyptian hieroglyphs.
The development of hieroglyphs passed three important stages:
The sequence and the geographical spread of Cretan hieroglyphs, Linear A, and Linear B, the five overlapping, but distinct, writing systems of Bronze Age Crete and the Greek mainland can be summarized as follows:
The Aegean and Cretan Hieroglyphs fonts support Cretan hieroglyphs.