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One tablet, sign by sign

This is HT 13, a clay tablet from Haghia Triada. It is a list. Almost everything in Linear A is a list: a word, a number, a word, a number, then a total. Nobody knows what most of the words mean. Everybody agrees on the numbers.

The object

A small slab of clay, written on while it was soft and then left to dry, never meant to last past the season it recorded. It lasted anyway. The building burned, the fire baked the clay, and a scrap of somebody's bookkeeping outlived the palace.

Photograph of tablet HT 13
Tablet HT 13, the object. Photograph: lineara.xyz mirror. Published here for this document under a permission request. Image rights largely Ecole Francaise d'Athenes.

The tracing

A person drew the strokes from the object. Everything else on this page is cut from this drawing. Not a font. Not a guess.

Tracing of HT 13
Tablet HT 13, the tracing. 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.

The signs, one by one

Each crop is one sign, in the order a scribe would read it. The label is the catalogue number and, where scholars agree, the sound. AB77 is read ka, for example. The AB numbers are shared with Linear B, which can be read. That is where the sounds come from, and it is an assumption, not a proof.

  1. Sign AB77 ka, HT 13, position 1 AB77 ka
  2. Sign AB10 u, HT 13, position 2 AB10 u
  3. Sign AB45 de, HT 13, position 3 AB45 de
  4. Sign AB59 ta, HT 13, position 4 AB59 ta
  5. Sign AB131a VIN, HT 13, position 5 AB131a VIN
  6. Sign AB04 te, HT 13, position 6 AB04 te
  7. Sign AB27 re, HT 13, position 7 AB27 re
  8. Sign AB17 za, HT 13, position 8 AB17 za
  9. Sign A707 J, HT 13, position 9 A707 J
  10. Sign AB04 te, HT 13, position 10 AB04 te
  11. Sign AB69 tu, HT 13, position 11 AB69 tu
  12. Sign AB04 te, HT 13, position 12 AB04 te
  13. Sign AB67 ki, HT 13, position 13 AB67 ki
  14. Sign A707 J, HT 13, position 14 A707 J
  15. Sign AB81 ku, HT 13, position 15 AB81 ku
  16. Sign AB79, HT 13, position 16 AB79
  17. Sign AB30 ni FIC, HT 13, position 17 AB30 ni FIC
  18. Sign AB01 da, HT 13, position 18 AB01 da
  19. Sign AB41 si, HT 13, position 19 AB41 si
  20. Sign AB118, HT 13, position 20 AB118
  21. Sign AB28 i, HT 13, position 21 AB28 i
  22. Sign AB51 du, HT 13, position 22 AB51 du
  23. Sign AB24 ne, HT 13, position 23 AB24 ne
  24. Sign AB41 si, HT 13, position 24 AB41 si
  25. Sign AB81 ku, HT 13, position 25 AB81 ku
  26. Sign AB02 ro, HT 13, position 26 AB02 ro
  27. Sign A707 J, HT 13, position 27 A707 J
The signs of HT 13 in reading order, each one cropped from the tracing. The label under each crop is the catalogue number and, where one is agreed, the sound value.

The numbers

Numerals are the easy part. A vertical stroke is one, a horizontal stroke is ten, a circle is a hundred. Add them up. The script below does exactly that, line by line, from the sign-by-sign text of the record.

  1. line 1 ka AB77u AB10de AB45ta AB59AB131a|te AB04|
  2. line 2 re AB27za AB175?J A707?
  3. line 3 te AB04tu AB6956
  4. line 4 te AB04ki AB6727J A707
  5. line 5 ku AB81AB79ni_FIC AB3018
  6. line 6 da AB01si AB41AB11819
  7. line 7 i AB28du AB51ne AB24si AB415
  8. line 8 ku AB81ro AB02130J A707
Every line of HT 13 as text. Numerals are added up and shown as digits. A question mark is a damaged sign. A bar is a word divider.

The total

The last line starts with two signs read ku and ro. On the tablets with totals, the number after ku-ro is the sum of the numbers above it, often enough that everybody accepts ku-ro as "total". Here is the check for this tablet.

  1. Sign AB81 ku, HT 13, position 25AB81 ku
  2. Sign AB02 ro, HT 13, position 26AB02 ro

line 8 ku AB81ro AB02130J A707

Arithmetic check: balances. integers balance 130 = 130.

The last line of HT 13: the word ku-ro and a number. The check compares that number with the sum of the entries above it, from the 2026-08-13 audit file.

Photograph against tracing

The tracing is somebody's reading of the object. Drag the curtain and judge it yourself.

The comparator needs JavaScript. The layers are the photograph, the facsimile, the tracing and the plate of HT 13, registered into one frame.
Photograph against tracing for HT 13. Drag the curtain. The layers were registered offline; the browser computes no geometry.

The full record of HT 13

Four more

The same walk for four other objects from Haghia Triada.