Primary Source XLVII: Sir Arthur Evans and the Cypro-Minoan Script

Sir Arthur Evans was a British archaeologist best known for excavating the Minoan palace at Knossos in Crete. He named the Minoan civilization, developed the idea of a pre-Greek Aegean culture, and famously (though controversially) reconstructed parts of the site. But for our purposes, Evans played a key early role in identifying and naming the Cypro-Minoan script. During his study of Aegean scripts, he noticed that some undeciphered inscriptions from Late Bronze Age Cyprus resembled the Linear A script of Minoan Crete and he coined the term Cypro-Minoan to describe these signs, believing they represented a local offshoot of the Minoan writing tradition brought to Cyprus through cultural contact or colonization. Evans recognized its significance and proposed that it was a syllabic script related to earlier Aegean systems. In this excerpt, we hear from his own observations on the enigmatic script -- which leads us to next month's guest, Dr. Cassandra Donnelly as we discuss the enigmatic and undeciphered Cypro-Minoan script!

You can listen to Primary Source XLVII: Sir Arthur Evans and the Cypro-Minoan Script online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Primary Source XLVII: Sir Arthur Evans and the Cypro-Minoan Script is an episode from The History of Cyprus Podcast by cyprusthepodcast.

This episode is 2:14 long.

This episode was published on Jan 15, 2026.

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