Volume 1

MINOAN LINEAR A, VOLUME I, HURRIANS AND HURRIAN IN MINOAN CRETE, PART 1. The author has reviewed previous attempts to decipher Minoan Linear A concluding that none can be accepted as presenting consistent phonological and morphological evidence, which is required for identification of an idiom written with an undeciphered script. Using phonological and morphological evidence, he has shown by linguistic methods that Linear A may well be the notation of an idiom with specific phonological features and a morphology of agglutinative character that can be explained from Hurrian. Finally, he has identified Linear A sequences with Hurrian lexical terms and many Hurrian onomastics. More decisive is the evidence of typical grammatical forms with specific suffixes in Linear A that can only be interpreted as Hurrian, for instance, Linear A u-mi-na-si = umminnaši (of the lands), e-na-si = e-en-na-a-ši (of the gods) with the Hurrian suffixes of the plural article and plural genitive. The structure of Hurrian names, especially of theophorous personal names, can easily be recognized: Linear A su-ki-ri-te-i-ja = cuneiform Šukri-tea, hypocoristic of Šukri-tešub (Tešub = Hurrian Stormgod).