Every ancient language that has ever been deciphered needed an anchor. Usually that’s a bilingual text, like the Rosetta Stone, or a known relative to compare it to. Linear A, the writing system of the Bronze Age Minoan civilisation on the Greek island of Crete, has neither.
Linear A is described as a “language isolate” because it has no confirmed link to any known language, living or dead. As such, it has posed a significant challenge for linguists over the past century.
Etruscan, a language of Italy that was used before the rise of the Roman Empire, has fared only slightly better. A partial vocabulary has been collected from short funerary inscriptions, but its grammar and deeper meaning still elude linguists.
Both languages are exactly the kind of puzzle that AI has recently been pulled into—not by replacing the linguists, but by supercharging their hunches. So does AI actually stand a chance of finishing what a century of human effort hasn’t?
A recent case shows both the appeal and the catch. In June 2026, a self-taught AI engineer and amateur linguist claimed a breakthrough on Linear A. It started from a single guess that one unknown word in a prayer inscription derived from a Semitic root meaning “to dwell” or “to inhabit”.
He then used AI-built programming scripts to test that sound-pattern against the rest of a collected Linear A corpus. He was reportedly able to assign values to 40 signs and compiled a 408-word lexicon, showing – in his view—that Linear A is an extinct member of the Semitic language group, which encompasses languages such as Hebrew and Aramaic.
The need for creativity #
It’s worth being precise about what AI did and didn’t do here. It didn’t have the idea. The engineer did.