AI Aids Linear A Analysis, but Experts Reject Claims of Decipherment

Linear A, a writing system used on Bronze Age Crete from roughly 1800 to 1450 BC, remains undeciphered. Unlike Linear B, which was shown to encode an early form of Greek, Linear A lacks a bilingual inscription or other firm linguistic anchor. That gap prevents researchers from reliably assigning sounds, grammar and meanings to its symbols, making claims of a breakthrough especially difficult to substantiate.

An amateur engineer recently said AI-powered scripts could help unlock the lost script by detecting recurring signs and structural patterns across inscriptions. Experts said such tools can accelerate clustering, frequency analysis and comparisons across fragmented datasets. But statistical regularities do not establish meaning: without bilingual text or independent archaeological and linguistic evidence, a model cannot verify that its proposed readings correspond to the language once recorded in Linear A.