Clay Ball with Cypro-Minoan Inscription (AM 2235)
Unknown · Late Cypriot period, circa 1600 to 1050 BC
A ball of fired clay, hardly bigger than a marble, incised with a line of signs in the Cypro-Minoan script. Bring your eye close to the case: the signs were scratched into the wet clay with a pointed tool before firing, and they run around the curved surface like a short message written on a bead. The museum believes they may spell out personal names, but the script has never been deciphered, so the exact meaning remains out of reach.
Some ninety such balls are known, almost all of them from Enkomi, the great Bronze Age port on the east coast of Cyprus, where this one was excavated by the French mission and allocated to the Louvre in the division of finds. Scholars have suggested they were tokens for assigning tasks, lots drawn in a ritual, or simply labels, but the truth is that no one knows. Together with the tablet and cylinder seals in this case, the ball is one of the rare witnesses to how a Cypriot community used writing in the age of the Aegean palaces and the Egyptian New Kingdom.
Did You Know? Nearly all of the known Cypro-Minoan clay balls, around ninety, come from the single site of Enkomi.
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