Writing, marking and trade in Late Bronze Age Cyprus

Cassandra Donnelly presents the inaugural seminar of the ERC-funded COMPAS (Commercial Patterns Across the Sea) project at the Archaeological Research Unit, introduced by project director Artemis Georgiou. The talk examines Cypro-Minoan writing, single-sign potmarks, and their relationship to overseas trade in the Late Bronze Age.

Donnelly begins with the history of the script, from its adaptation from Crete and Linear A in the 16th and 15th centuries BC to its expansion in the 13th century (LC IIC) and its survival past the collapse of centralized palace administrations into the Cypro-Geometric period, citing six post-Bronze Age inscriptions including a bronze bowl from Palaepaphos. Unlike Linear B or cuneiform, Cypro-Minoan rarely appears on standardized administrative tablets with logograms and numerals. Instead, it is found on objects associated with trade, including ceramic vessels, ingots, tools, and cylinder seals, with examples recovered outside Cyprus at Tiryns, Ugarit, Melos, and the Gelidonya and Hishuley Carmel shipwrecks.

A central problem is the boundary between multi-sign inscriptions and single-sign potmarks. The corpora of Jean-Pierre Olivier and Silvia Ferrara exclude single-sign marks, leaving over two thousand marked vessels outside the formal corpus. Building on the work of Nicole Hirschfeld, Donnelly argues that many single-sign marks on vessels, tools, and seals were produced in the same literate environments as multi-sign inscriptions, sharing formatting, incision methods, object types, and sign variants.

She then reviews current debates in Cypro-Minoan studies: the unfixed signary (ranging from Emilia Masson's over one hundred signs to Miguel Valério's sixty-six and Martina Polig's eighty-eight based on 3D laser scans), the rejection of Masson's division of the script into CM 1, CM 2 (the Enkomi tablets), and CM 3, and disputed texts such as a three-sign handle on a Canaanite jar from Mycenae. Donnelly concludes by outlining her role in the COMPAS database, classifying and examining marks on some four hundred imported maritime transport containers. An extensive discussion follows with Bernard Knapp, Jennifer Webb, Gloria London, Nicole Hirschfeld, Pippa Steele, and Maria Iacovou, covering the definition of mercantile contexts, Early Bronze Age marking traditions, pre- and post-firing incisions, inscribed clay balls, and Iron Age continuities.