lineara.eu

About this site

A site about Linear A for one reader: a curious person who has heard of it and wants to see it. Not a research workbench, not a decipherment, not a theory. Pictures first, words second.

Who

Matt Navarre, a database developer in Rethymnon, Crete. Scholars have been at this since 1900. He started in 2025 and has not read a sentence either.

How it is made

A script reads the corpus files and writes every page. No count on this site is typed by hand. Every picture of a sign is a tracing from a real object, cut by SigLA, and the credit sits in the footer of every page. AI agents did most of the plumbing (and logged what they did). Before each release a person will read thirty random pages against the source records, and the findings go in the repository with the date and the reader.

What it is not

It is not a font demo. No Linear A font character appears anywhere on the site, because font shapes are modern and the incised shapes are the evidence. It is not complete. Where an input was not ready at build time the page says "coming" instead of pretending.

Contact

Write to matt@navarre.training. Corrections welcome, with the document id and the source.

The gates

The build refuses to publish when any of these fails. The output folder is deleted, so a bad page never ships.

  1. No Linear A codepoint and no private-use character in any file.
  2. No em dash in any file.
  3. The SigLA credit line on every page that shows a tracing.
  4. Every image resolves to a file, with alt, width and height.
  5. Every internal link resolves to a page.
  6. One h1 per page.
  7. Every statistic carries its denominator.
  8. Every copy file passes site/scripts/copy_check.py.
  9. Images come only from the permitted folders.

Sources and licences

  • Sign tracings. Sign drawings from SigLA: The Signs of Linear A, a palaeographical database, by Ester Salgarella and Simon Castellan (https://sigla.phis.me/), licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Relief: NASA Blue Marble: Next Generation (public domain, NASA Earth Observatory, R. Stockli). Hillshade from Copernicus DEM GLO-30, produced using Copernicus WorldDEM-30 (c) DLR e.V. 2010-2014 and (c) Airbus Defence and Space GmbH 2014-2018 provided under COPERNICUS by the European Union and ESA; all rights reserved. Changes: crops are shown unchanged, resized for the screen.
  • Corpus. The project's merged corpus (browser-data.json), built from lineara.xyz (Robert Hogan) and SigLA (Salgarella and Castellan). Transcription data on this site is CC BY 4.0 where the project holds the rights; the upstream terms stay in force.
  • Photographs. Shown for 5 of 1,880 documents only, in the comparator, under the credit each layer prints. No other photograph is on this site.
  • Map. Natural Earth, 1:10m land, public domain.
  • Search. Pagefind (MIT) and MiniSearch (MIT), both served from this site. No third-party request leaves the page.

The sign browser's own credits file lists: sigla, corpus, interpretations.

This build

Built 2026-09-07. 753 of 1,880 documents have a whole tracing. 786 of 1,880 documents have per-sign crops.