The Cretan Script Family Includes the Carian Alphabet

The Cretan Script Family is a set of related writing systems that have a putative origin in Crete. Recently, Revesz [11] identified the Cretan Hieroglyphs, Linear A, Linear B, the Cypriot syllabary, and the Greek, Old Hungarian, Phoenician, South Arabic and Tifinagh alphabets as members of this script family and using bioinformatics algorithms gave a hypothetical evolutionary tree for their development and presented a map for their likely spread in the Mediterranean and Black Sea areas. The evolutionary tree and the map indicated some unknown writing system in western Anatolia to be the common origin of the Cypriot syllabary and the Old Hungarian alphabet. This paper argues that the missing link may be some ancestor of the Carian alphabet because several Carian alphabet letters show an intermediate stage between the corresponding Cypriot syllabary signs and the Old Hungarian letters.

Abstract licence: CC BY

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