Tablet in Cypro-Minoan Script from Enkomi
Unknown · Late Cypriot III, circa 1230 to 1050 BC
A brown clay tablet, eight centimetres high and twelve wide, its face covered with rows of incised signs. The characters belong to the Cypro-Minoan script, in the developed form used at Enkomi in the closing centuries of the Bronze Age. Notice how the lines of writing are ruled and how the signs are cut with straight, confident strokes rather than the wedge impressions used in Mesopotamia. The tablet is one of a very small number of longer Cypro-Minoan texts, and its length makes it especially precious to those trying to crack the script.
The tablet was excavated at Enkomi in nineteen fifty-three by the French mission and came to the Louvre in the division of finds. Enkomi was then a fortified city of stone-built houses, workshops and sanctuaries, trading copper across the eastern Mediterranean. Unlike the short labels on clay balls, a tablet of this size suggests a record or a document kept by an administration. What it records is still unknown: with fewer than three hundred inscriptions surviving, Cypro-Minoan has resisted every attempt at decipherment. Standing here, you are looking at words no one has read for three thousand years.
Did You Know? Fewer than three hundred Cypro-Minoan inscriptions survive in total, far too few for scholars to decipher the script.
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