A Computational Study of the Evolution of Cretan and Related Scripts

Crete was the birthplace of several ancient writings, including the Cretan Hieroglyphs, the Linear A and the Linear B scripts. Out of these three only Linear B is deciphered. The sound values of the Cretan Hieroglyph and the Linear A symbols are unknown and attempts to reconstruct them based on Linear B have not been fruitful. In this paper, we compare the ancient Cretan scripts with four other Mediterranean and Black Sea scripts, namely Phoenician, South Arabic, Greek and Old Hungarian. We provide a computational study of the evolution of the three Cretan and four other scripts. This study encompasses a novel translation of the scripts to a DNA encoding, which enables the use of hypothetical evolutionary tree reconstruction algorithms from the area of bioinformatics. Keywords—Cretan Hieroglyph, Linear A, Linear B, Evolution, Neighbor Joining, Phylogenetic tree.