Minoan language itself unclassified. Minoan is mainly known from the inscriptions in Linear A, which are fairly legible by comparison with Linear B. The Cretan hieroglyphs are dated from the first half of the 2nd millennium BCE. The Linear A texts, mostly written in clay tablets, are spread all over Crete with more than 40 localities on the island. From the 18th dynasty of Egypt there are four texts containing names and sayings in the Keftiu language (). They are, as usual in non-Egyptian texts, written in Egyptian hieroglyphs, which allow a more precise pronunciation. On the basis of these texts, the
Cypro-Minoan syllabary originated or about the underlying language. However, its use continued into the early Iron Age, forming a link to the Cypriot syllabary, which has been deciphered as Greek. Arthur Evans considered the Cypro-Minoan syllabary to be a result of uninterrupted evolution of the Minoan Linear A script. He believed that the script was brought to Cyprus by Minoan colonizers or immigrants. Evans' theory was uncritically supported until recently, when it was shown that the earliest Cypro-Minoan inscriptions were separated from the earliest texts in Linear A by less than a century, yet the Cypro-Minoan script at its earliest stage was