Three lines, two numbers

This is HT 92, a clay tablet from Haghia Triada. Three lines. Six traced signs. Two numbers. No ku-ro, so there is nothing to add up. It is the shortest walk on this site, and the one with the largest single number of the five.

The object

Found in Casa Room 7. Heraklion Museum, number 1324. Younger gives it to HT Scribe 2 and notes two vacant lines below the text.

Photograph of tablet HT 92 — Tablet HT 92, the object. Photograph: lineara.xyz mirror. Published here with the permission of lineara.xyz. Image rights largely Ecole Francaise d'Athenes.

The tracing

A person drew the strokes from the object. Every crop below is cut from this drawing, not from a font.

Tracing of HT 92 — Tablet HT 92, 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

Line 1 is te and a divider: a heading. Line 2 is a-du, a divider, and the grain logogram (AB120, GRA in the Linear B convention) with its number. Line 3 is the sign *304 with its number. The tracing has six crops, and the grain sign is there twice; the sign-by-sign text has it once. Two layers of data, one disagreement, both shown.

Sign AB04 te, HT 92, position 1 — The signs of HT 92 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.

Sign AB08 a, HT 92, position 2 — The signs of HT 92 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

Grain 680. Then *304 12. That is the whole tablet. The grain line alone is bigger than the whole wine list on HT 13, total and all.

The numbers of HT 92, line by line
Line	Word	Amount
Line 1	te (the heading)	(no amount)
Line 2	a-du, GRA (grain)	680
Line 3	*304	12

Show the signs

line 1 te AB04|
line 2 a AB08 du AB51|GRA AB120680
line 3 A30412

Each sign by its catalogue number and, where one is agreed, its sound. A question mark is a damaged sign. A bar is a word divider.

The numbers of HT 92, one row for each word and its amount, read from the sign-by-sign text of the record.

What everybody agrees on

A heading-and-quantity record: te, then a-du, then grain and a number, then *304 and a number, with no names in between and no total at the end. Younger lists it among the tablets where a-du is the heading, in the form te, a-du, GRA. Schoep's typology files it under mixed commodities.

What is disputed

What a-du means. The mirror record offers "assessment?", question mark included. Younger's notes treat it as a transaction heading and stop short of a gloss. And what *304 is. The mirror record says olive oil. Younger's notes say a common agricultural product that accompanies grain here, and do not say oil. This site says: an agricultural commodity, identity uncertain.

Photograph against tracing

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

The comparator needs JavaScript. The layers are the photograph, the facsimile and the tracing of HT 92, registered into one frame.

Photograph against tracing for HT 92. Drag the curtain. The layers were registered offline; the browser computes no geometry.

Credits

Tracing: SigLA, Ester Salgarella and Simon Castellan, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Photograph: as captioned above. Readings and commentary: John G. Younger, Linear A Texts and Inscriptions in phonetic transcription and Commentary (2024), quoted in short. Findspot and museum number: the lineara.xyz record, which draws on GORILA (Godart and Olivier, 1976 to 1985). Typology: Schoep 2002.

The full record of HT 92

Four more

The same walk for four other objects from Haghia Triada.