Minoan and Mycenaean fig trees: some retrospective and prospective comments

Abstract

The photograph I have chosen to illustrate my all-too-brief comments for this posting shows a fig tree. My first impression when I look at any adult fig tree in general is that its branches seem to crisscross each other, as we can see in the photograph I show here. And this visual pattern of crisscrossing reminds me of the ideogram representing this tree in the scripts used by Minoan and Mycenaean scribes in the second half of the second millennium BCE. In both scripts, Minoan Linear A and Mycenaean Linear B, the ideogram is shaped like the capital letter Y, but each one of the two branches of this Y is crisscrossed by one counter-branch, so that the vertical stem of the tree, shaped like a capital I, gets crowned by two sets of branches, and each set is shaped like a capital X. In this posting, I will show what I think are two examples of this ideogram, written in Linear A. The writing is on the surface of two clay sealings found at the site of the Minoan palace at Hagia Triada in Crete, dating back to the fifteenth century BCE. These sealings, technically “roundels,” were receipts for commodities. (I have corrected my original wording here, following the advice of John G. Younger about the function of “roundels.”) At the center of both these sealings, in terms of my argument, is the Linear A ideogram for {FIG TREE}, and, at each side of the ideogram, are two signs for two syllables that spell, if you put them together, a word that means ‘figs’ in Greek as spoken in the post-Minoan-Mycenaean era of the first millennium BCE.