Minoan sarcophagus (Hanover) Minoan sarcophagus (Hanover) A Minoan Sarcophagus, also called a larnax, is among the major display pieces of the antiquities collection of the Museum August Kestner in Hanover. The larnax is dated to the fourteenth century BC, which corresponds to the Late Minoan III A period, and probably comes from the island of Crete. It entered the antiquities collection of the Museum August Kestner in 1989 (inventory number 1989.30) Larnakes are clay sarcophagi modelled on wood and were a standard part of Minoan funerary practices. The Hanover larnax survives largely complete except for the fragmentary lid. Missing portions, especially on one
Cypro-Minoan syllabary polis itself. Since then, the number of Greek artifacts gradually increases in the Cypriot context, and around 950 BC the Cypro-Minoan script suddenly disappears, being soon substituted by the new Cypriot syllabary, whose inscriptions represent mainly the Greek language, with just a few short texts in Eteocypriot. As long as the script remains undeciphered (with only about 15-20 signs having clear parallels in cognate scripts), it can only be speculated whether the language was the same as Minoan or Eteocypriot, and whether these two were identical. However, Silvia Ferrara and A. Bernard Knapp noted that the name "Cypro-Minoan" (based on