senryu – the pupil = la pupille

senryu – the pupil = la pupille

the pupil
in the starry iris –
just a black hole?





la pupille
dans l’iris étoilé –
rien qu’un trou noir ?

Richard Vallance

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summer haiku – stray kitten = chaton égaré

summer haiku – stray kitten = chaton égaré

stray kitten
on a ramshackle porch –
his infected eye



chaton égaré
sur un porche délabré –
l’oeil infecté

Richard Vallance

Cretan pictograms – the first 14: the origins of syllabograms

Cretan pictograms – the first 14: the origins of syllabograms:

Cretan pictograms – the first 14: the origins of syllabograms:

There are 14 Cretan syllabary-like pictograms, most of which look like primitive syllabograms in Linear A, but almost certainly are not syllabograms. But all of them but one (the crescent moon on its side) are (almost) identical to the Linear A syllabograms A, DA, DI, NI, NU, RU, QE, SE, TA, TE and TU. But it is without a shadow of a doubt a mistake to identify any of them as syllabograms as such. They are the primordial templates of the latter.

In my previous posts on Cretan pictograms, I asserted that there were only 45 of them. That was a grievous mistake. I was way off the mark. Upon close examination of all of the Cretan pictograms so meticulously identified by Sir Arthur Evans in Scripta Minoa (1909, 1952), I discovered to my amazement that there are around 200 of them, exclusive of numerics, which have been successfully deciphered by Evans. From here on in, all posts on Cretan pictograms, whether (possibly/probably/definitely) known or unknown, i.e indecipherable, will be numbered sequentially until the absolute total of them all is reached. As we can see, the first 14 are those which look like Linear A syllabograms. In the next post, I shall introduce the Cretan pictograms for crops, which number sequentially from 15 to 23. Subsequent posts will identify Cretan pictograms from 24 onward.

In spite of the fact that many researchers call Cretan pictograms hieroglyphs, they simply cannot be, since 200 is far too small a figure for hieroglyphics or for scripts like Cuneiform. Both of the latter contain at least 1,000 figures or characters. This clearly disqualifies Cretan pictograms as hieroglyphs. In 1909 Sir Arthur Evans correctly identified them as pictograms right from the outside, and his conclusions are sound.