Evidence of General Reading Ability Without Schooling in Bronze Age Crete

This paper presents the idea that a general reading ability of the population of Bronze Age Crete could have been possible without schooling, due to some special characteristics of the Eteocretan language, spoken at that era in Crete. The Eteocretan scribes deviced the Cretan Protolinear syllabary, by using the rebus principle, consisting of abstract/simplified images of natural objects for signs. The cognitive correspondence of those signs to the names/words of the depicted objects could have made reading feasible to the public, without the necessity of attending school, as it happens nowadays with the understandability of webdings and wingdings.