The history of writing shows that throughout the world there are fundamentally only three ways of transcribing the spoken word: pictograms, syllabic scripts and phonetic alphabets (in that order). All known scripts use either one of those techniques or a combination of them. Only the last of the three is suitable for an adequate representation of sound patterns. The consonantal script that was adopted mainly in the East constitutes a special form of phonetic script.
In Hellas and the Aegean the oldest textual evidence comes from Crete [2]: the hieroglyp…