“Alcune riflessioni intorno ad AB 80 e alla Cosiddetta “cat mask” del geroglifico minoico”

The main interest of syllabic sign AB 80 lies in its palaeographical connections with a sign used only iconographically on Minoan glyptic: the “cat mask”. In this respect, AB 80 is one of the many “ambiguities” in the sign use in the Hieroglyphic and Linear A writing systems, revealing a conscious functional choice of Linear A-scribes. In Linear B, AB 80 seems to be -formally at least- one of the constituent syllables of *145 WOOL. It is temping, indeed, to suppose that this sign is a direct borrowing from the Linear A monogram Lc 46 -made up of AB 80 + AB 26, sometimes interpreted as maru, gr. mallos, which it closely resembles, while *145 WOOL seems to be used as a stereotyped part of the ideographic repertory. So we could ask, on the linguistic level, whether the connection with that word was -if possible- non normative -at least, not anymore-, with *145 designating “wool” on purely pictographic level and being truly an ideogram. As we can see, the presence or absence of linguistic codification -and, subsequently, the distinction between the graphic and the linguistic level- seems to represent the chief question of this multifunctional sign use, following a nearly circular process from its use with iconographical function on Minoan seals until designating, probably only ideogrammatically, the wool in Linear B.