Cretan hieroglyphs decoded?
A social post says researchers have made headway decoding Cretan hieroglyph fragments from a Mediterranean civilization about 3,500 years old — a script that’s puzzled scholars for roughly 60 years. The find was highlighted by Jonathan Lingard and is circulating on X with images and discussion of possible readings and contexts. (x.com)
Jonathan Lingard’s X post that kicked off the recent spike of attention includes photos of the fragments and suggested readings circulated as images and text. (x.com) No academic press release or peer‑reviewed article confirming a formal decipherment appears to have been published; major recent reference works still describe Cretan hieroglyphic as undeciphered. (cambridge.org) Several online projects and a public GitHub repository have posted step‑by‑step “decipherment” logs and proposed sign values, the most visible being a group using the name Lackadaisical‑Security that has published extensive annotations and methodology notes. (github.com) Leading scholarly treatments published since 2024 emphasize improved cataloguing and interpretive tools but stop short of accepting a full reading; reviewers say the field has better resources but not a closed decipherment. (cambridge.org) The canonical corpus used for comparison remains the Corpus Hieroglyphicarum Inscriptionum Cretae (CHIC) and related published sign inventories and deposits from Knossos, Malia and Petras that scholars still use as the baseline dataset. (en.wikipedia.org) What would change consensus: a transparent publication of the proposed readings tied to reproducible transcriptions, demonstrated internal consistency with CHIC material, and independent epigraphic and archaeological validation in peer‑reviewed venues — steps urged in recent computational and methodological reviews. (aclanthology.org)
