In the land of Lilliput: writing in the Bronze Age Aegean

Abstract

A neglected aspect of ‘miniaturization’ is the development of the so-called ‘pictographic’ or ‘iconographic’ writing systems. ‘Picture-writing’ is the term used to describe the beginnings of various scripts, whereby the initial inspiration for the visual rendering of the signs is suggested to have been an array of tangible objects, or parts thereof. This article investigates the ‘miniaturization’ of objects to script signs and the cognitive processes at play during most of the second millennium bce in the Aegean. The Cretan Hieroglyphic, Linear A and Linear B had a standard and constantly renewed relation with this virtual ‘borrowing’ of object forms for the needs of the scripts themselves and the administrative systems that commanded them. This process ran parallel to other ‘miniaturization’ favourites of the same period, namely the ‘miniaturization’ of clay pots, animals and humans as well as representations of human activities. The eventual relations between these different ‘miniaturizations’ are also examined.

Keywords:

• Miniaturization
• picture-writing
• writing systems
• segmentation
• Bronze Age Aegean
• Minoan

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the Austrian Science Fund [FWF-Projekt M1427].

Notes on contributors

Artemis Karnava

Artemis Karnava currently holds a Lise Meitner Senior Post-Doc position at the Institute of Classical Archaeology, University of Vienna, Austria [FWF-Project M1427]. She was trained as an archaeologist (BA, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece; MA, University of Sheffield, UK) and specializes in Cypro-Aegean prehistoric epigraphy (PhD, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium). Her research interests include the archaeology and epigraphy of the Eastern Mediterranean from the third to the first millennium BCE.