Minoan Linear A ADU on tablets dealing with grain & wheat refer to the TOTAL harvest:Minoan Linear A ADU on tablets dealing with grain & wheat apparently refer to the TOTAL harvest. After spending the past three months wracking my brains out over this term, ADU, I have finally settled on its being the approximate, if not exact, equivalent of the Mycenaean Linear B terms, toso, tosa, as illustrated in the figure above. All this amounts to nothing more or less than taking into account the total harvest of grains or wheat, as seen on tablets HT 92, with no fewer than 680 “bushel-like” units of wheat! I say “bushel-like” because there is no way on earth that we in the twenty-first century can ever know what the standard unit for measuring wheat was for the Minoans. But there can be little doubt but that these tablets all deal with the standard unit for measuring grans and wheat, because the first two use the term tereza and the last one reza, which are the actual Minoan standard units for measuring large quantities. On the first two tablets (HT 92 & HT 133) the total number (ADU) refers to the actual large units of wheat measured (something like our modern “bushels”). But on Linear tablet HT 92. we are faced with a different scenario. Here ADU refers to all the men who are carrying out the measurement of 55 large “bushel-like” units of grains or wheat. So it is quite reasonable to assume that the occupational title (so to speak) of these folks would be something like surveyor or comptroller, since these are in fact the métiers of people who undertake such measurements. But remember. We are not just dealing with some of the comptrollers measuring the 55 large units of wheat. We are dealing with all 20 of them. In other words, ADU is the approximate, if not exact, equivalent of the Mycenaean Linear B term toso (masc. sing. & pl. & neut. sing.) and tosa (neut. pl.), which correspond precisely with the same forms of the ancient Greek words meaning all you see in the figure above. This brings the number of Minoan Linear A words I have deciphered, more or less accurately, to an even 100.
5 thoughts on “Minoan Linear A ADU on tablets dealing with grain & wheat refer to the TOTAL harvest = term 100”
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Well I personally think you deserve a medal.
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Thanks!
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WOW ! Shall we celebrate? John and I will drink a toast to you when we go out for lunch tomorrow. Great work.
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Thanks so much! Please do celebrate with a toast. But I am so discouraged that, as usual, hardly anyone pays any attention to what I am doing, especially with Linear A. It really gets me down. Also, people do not show much interest in my article in Archaeology and Science on academia.edu. But I guess this is going to take some time. I plan on posting an INTRODUCTORY article on my Glossary of 101 words in Minoan Linear A on academia.edu. Hopefully that will arouse some interest.
Anyway.
And you get discouraged by some of your marks on the Final Exam first year! Boy, can I sympathize. I feel like I am taking a final exam on Linear A myself, and flunking.
Bye for now
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