Minoan Linear A

The Minoan Linear A script has mystified scholars over the last 70 years. The first Linear A clay tablets discovered from 1900 A.D. at Knossos, Phaistos and Hagia Triada puzzled some of the greatest minds in the linguistic field, especially after Michael Ventris's decipherment of the younger related script of Linear B as Mycenaean Greek in 1952.

Through systematic linguistic research, Peter van Soesbergen has established that the Linear A script records an agglutinative and ergative language. Hurrian, the dominant language of the kingdom of Mitanni (Northern Iraq, Eastern Anatolia, Syria), turned out to be the best candidate, especially because dominance of Mitanni in the Near East was approximately contemporary with Minoan Linear A in Crete; 12 years of linguistic research proved that the idiom of Linear A can be nothing else than Hurrian.