One word on a lump of clay

This is HT Wa 1017. Not a tablet. A nodule: a small lump of clay with a seal pressed into the back and two signs written on the front. 929 of 1,883 documents in the corpus are nodules and sealings, more than any other kind of object. So this, not the tablet, is the commonest face of Linear A.

The object

Found at Haghia Triada, in the area of Portico 11 and Room 13. Heraklion Museum, sealings number 446.3. On the back is a seal impression, AT 125, which Younger describes as a man in a kilt and a man in a robe walking left. He marks the hand "Scribe 51?", question mark his.

Photograph of nodule HT Wa 1017 — Nodule HT Wa 1017, 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 Wa 1017 — Nodule HT Wa 1017, 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

Two. si and ka. That is the whole inscription.

Sign AB41 si, HT Wa 1017, position 1 — The signs of HT Wa 1017 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 AB77 ka, HT Wa 1017, position 2 — The signs of HT Wa 1017 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

None. No numeral on this object, so nothing to add and nothing to check.

What everybody agrees on

One two-sign word on a sealed nodule. The same word, si-ka, is on 6 of 55 nodule records with a word list. Younger's lexicon marks it "lots", which is a note on frequency, not a meaning. The HT Wa series, the nodules of Haghia Triada, is the largest single group of records in the corpus: 873 of 1,883 documents in the corpus. Younger notes that the seal on this nodule is the seal most often used on the nodules.

What is disputed

What si-ka means. Nothing on file says, so this page does not either. What the nodule sealed, and what the word did for the person who sealed it, is a second question this page leaves open. The sources on file describe the object and the seal, not the job.

Photograph against tracing

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

The comparator needs JavaScript. The layers are the photograph, the facsimile and the tracing of HT Wa 1017, registered into one frame.

Photograph against tracing for HT Wa 1017. 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) and Linear A Lexicon (2024), quoted in short. Findspot, museum number and seal: the lineara.xyz record, which draws on GORILA (Godart and Olivier, 1976 to 1985). Counts: our own corpus data.

The full record of HT Wa 1017

Four more

The same walk for four other objects from Haghia Triada.