Our Mission
Phaistos Labs is building computational infrastructure to decipher Minoan Linear A, one of the last undeciphered writing systems of the ancient Mediterranean. Our approach combines constructed phonetic analysis with advanced phylogenetic language tree models to systematically reconstruct the sound values of Linear A signs.
By computationally mapping phonetic evolutionary pathways across Bronze Age language families, we construct probabilistic models of how sound systems shifted from known ancestor languages into the Minoan substrate. These models generate candidate phonetic readings for Linear A sequences, which we then validate by searching for statistically significant cognate matches against vocabularies of attested contemporary and descendant languages.
Each confirmed cognate serves as a beachhead — a fixed point from which we expand our phonetic grid outward, constraining the remaining sign values and progressively narrowing the solution space. Through iterative refinement of these phylogenetic mappings and cross-validation against independent epigraphic evidence, we aim to achieve the first systematic, reproducible decipherment of Linear A.