Linear A joins the library
22 October 2026 · Nabu news
The library now holds Linear A — the undeciphered administrative script of Minoan Crete, c. 1800–1450 BCE. The SigLA palaeographic database (Salgarella & Castellan, CC BY-NC-SA) arrives as 787 inscriptions and 3,097 sign groups from Haghia Triada, Khania, Phaistos, Zakros and Knossos, every sign attestation classified — syllabogram, logogram, fraction, erasure — and read by phonetic value where one exists. The data ships as OCaml Marshal blobs inside a JavaScript file; the new decoder reads the format natively and proves itself by re-encoding both payloads byte-for-byte. A researched table of Minoan ceramic phases (with the Thera high-chronology dispute declared, not hidden) dates 760 of the 787 inscriptions; every one is placed at its find-site.
Beside it, the first real Old Uyghur dictionary: Wilkens’s Handwörterbuch des Altuigurischen (Göttingen 2021, CC BY-SA), 49,619 entries glossed in German and Turkish, segmented from the printed book’s PDF text layer with entry stacks, column-crossing hyphen wraps and homonym numbering preserved — and the arithmetic published: 49,619 accepted plus 2 named skips reconcile exactly against the 49,621 records the segmentation experiment measured last window.
Underneath, the quieter rails. The Hebrew Bible’s clause and phrase grammar now rides every span, the Dead Sea Scrolls’ lexeme crosswalk to it is censused at 99.98%, and the Middle German corpora recovered annotation lanes a parser had been dropping. The parallels engine gained a measuring stick — recall benchmarks over six ground-truth sets, from inscription editions to Buddhist canon parallels, with seeded baselines pinned so every future scoring tweak must prove itself in numbers. And a convention now exists for any future model-produced enrichment: content-addressed caching, full prompt provenance, append-only cost ledgers and a monthly budget cap that fails closed.
The library stands at 2,854,118 documents / 128,499,000 passages across 327 live sources (as of 7 November 2026).