How it began
The script was used by the Late Bronze Age culture on the territory of present-day Cyprus from roughly 1550 or 1500 BCE to between 1150 and 1050 BCE. The earliest dated inscription is a thick clay tablet with three lines of writing, found at Enkomi in 1955 and dated to about 1500 BCE. Arthur Evans coined the name Cypro-Minoan in 1909 because its signs look like those of Linear A, the script of Minoan Crete, from which it is thought to derive. The model was Cretan, and the script itself took shape on Cyprus.
How it works
Cypro-Minoan is a syllabary, in which each sign stands for a syllable. Estimates of the number of distinct signs range from 57 to 59 up to 96, depending on how variants are counted. About 250 inscribed objects are known, carrying around 4,000 signs in total, more than 2,000 of them on tablets. Writers used it on small clay balls, clay cylinders, tablets, pot handles and vessels, copper ingots, cylinder seals and bronze and silver bowls, and the way a sign was drawn differed with the material.
How it spread
On Cyprus inscriptions come from Enkomi, Kalavasos-Ayios Dimitrios, Kourion, Kition, Old Paphos, Hala Sultan Tekke and other sites. Objects bearing the script have also been found at Ugarit on the Syrian coast, at Tiryns in Greece, at Cannatello in Sicily, at Ashkelon and in the Cape Gelidonya shipwreck, which reflects the island's trade. A recent study treats tablets from Enkomi and the standardizing of sign forms as evidence that professional scribes probably worked in some places and periods.
What lasted
Cypro-Minoan is regarded as the direct ancestor of the Cypriot syllabary of the first millennium BCE, which kept syllabic writing alive on the island after it had disappeared from the Aegean. Jean-Pierre Olivier sorted the inscriptions into three classes, and Emilia Masson proposed an archaic stage followed by CM1, CM2 and CM3. Silvia Ferrara later argued that these groups existed at the same time and follow the writing material more than the date.
Where it stands today
The script remains undeciphered. The reasons given are the small amount of text, the lack of any bilingual inscription and uncertainty about how many signs there really are. Work continues: Ferrara published an analysis and corpus in 2012 and 2013, Miguel Valerio proposed a revised sign inventory in 2016, and in 2022 researchers applied unsupervised deep learning to the sign forms. Cypro-Minoan was added to the Unicode Standard in September 2021 with version 14.0.
