Minoan Signs: An African Decipherment by GJK Campbell-Dunn

About the Book

Author Campbell-Dunn offers a great reference book for the university’s classics, history, and linguistics departments, school libraries, and language research centers with Minoan Signs – An African Decipherment. It centers on the idea that the Linear Scripts are the key to identifying the Linear A Minoan language, asserting that only Niger-Congo identifies the signs and that only Atlantic identifies the words of Linear A.

The book deciphers the Minoan Linear A Script, identifying the Linear A and B signs as objects familiar in the Bronze Age. It then shows that the Linear B phonetics gives the names of these objects in Niger-Congo, Atlantic Branch, represented by Fula and Gola. It explores the sounds, forms and grammar of Linear A in terms of Niger-Congo, using the script as a basis, and starting from what is known.

Here, commodity signs, the Cypriot signs, and Phaistos Disk are used as partial evidence. Then, a fuller comparative treatment and a list of Minoan words follow. Also added are suggestions about determinatives and Greek language, including particles and metre.

This book is the authentic Linear A decipherment, which uses the comparative method to identify the language group of Linear A and pinpoints actual closely related languages.

About the Author

GJK Campbell-Dunn graduated MA with 1st Class Honours in Classics at the University of New Zealand in 1962 and was awarded a postgraduate scholarship, gaining his MA at Cambridge in 1968. He was appointed to a lectureship in Classics, University of Canterbury, then to a senior lectureship in Classics, Victoria University, Wellington, in 1970. The author completed his PhD at Canterbury in 1982, and retired in 1990. At present he is researching African substrate.