thumb|250px|Line drawing rendering, bronze [[Idalion Tablet, 5th century BCE, Idalion, Cyprus.]]

The Cypriot or Cypriote syllabary (also Classical Cypriot Syllabary) is a syllabic script used in Iron Age Cyprus, from about the 11th to the 4th centuries BCE, when it was replaced by the Greek alphabet. It has been suggested that the script remained in use as late as the 1st century BCE. A pioneer of that change was King Evagoras of Salamis. It is thought to be descended from the Cypro-Minoan syllabary, itself a variant or derivative of Linear A. Most texts using the script are in the Arcadocypriot dialect of Greek, but also one bilingual inscription, the Amathus bilingual, a Greek and Eteocypriot, was found in Amathus.

Origin

It is thought that the Cypriot syllabary is derived from the Cypro-Minoan syllabary; the latter is thought to be derived from the Linear A script, and certainly belongs to the circle of Aegean scripts. The most obvious change is the disappearance of ideograms, which were frequent in, and represented a significant part of, Linear A. The earliest inscriptions are found on clay tablets. Parallel to the evolution of cuneiform, the signs soon became simple patterns of lines. There is no evidence of a Semitic influence due to trade, and this pattern seemed to have evolved as the result of habitual use.

Structure

The structure of the Cypriot syllabary is very similar to that of Linear B. This is due to their common origin and underlying language (albeit different dialects). Each sign generally stands for a syllable in the spoken language: e.g. ka, ke, ki, ko, ku. Hence, it is classified as a syllabic writing system. Because each sign stands for an open syllable (CV - a consonant followed by a vowel) rather than a closed one (CVC - a consonant, a vowel and then a consonant), the Cypriot syllabary is also an 'open' syllabary.

Corpus

About 1,000 inscriptions in the Cypriot syllabary have been found throughout many different regions. However, these inscriptions vary greatly in length and credibility. In the 1900s the work was taken up by T. B. Mitford and Olivier Masson. Over the years a number of inaccuracies and duplications crept into the collects corpus. In 2015, Massimo Perna published a consolidated and corrected corpus totaling 1,397 inscriptions.

Enkomi

The earliest dated inscription from Cyprus was discovered at Enkomi in 1955. It was a part of a thick clay tablet with only three lines of writing. Epigraphers immediately saw a resemblance. Because the date of the fragment was found to be around 1500 BCE, considerably earlier than Linear B, linguists determined that the Cypriot syllabary was derived from Linear A and not Linear B. Several other fragments of clay tablets were also found in Enkomi. They date to a later period, around the late 13th or 12th century BCE. The script found on these tablets has considerably evolved and the signs have become simple patterns of lines. Linguists named this new script as Cypro-Minoan syllabary.

The number of discoveries of new inscriptions has increased. However, most of the new discoveries have been short, or bear only a few signs. One example is a small clay ball.

Unicode

The Cypriot syllabary was added to the Unicode Standard in April 2003 with the release of version 4.0.

The Unicode block for Cypriot is U+10800–U+1083F.

The Unicode block for the related Aegean Numbers is U+10100–U+1013F.

See also

  • Pre-Greek substrate
  • Tamassos bilinguals

References

Bibliography

  • Omniglot.com – Cypriot syllabary
  • Ancientscripts.com – Cypriot
  • www.palaeolexicon.com – Word study tool of ancient languages (includes Cypriot syllabic dictionary)