Edward Clodd

THE CRETAN AND ALLIED SCRIPTS

When treating of the sources whence civilisation flowed westward centuries before Greece and Rome appear, the historian turns to the valleys of the Nile and the Euphrates. For Egypt and Chaldea have meant so much to us all in our search after the chief influences on man's intellectual and spiritual history, and this with increasing warrant, because the more widely investigation is pushed, the more venerable is the past of both countries found to have been. In the case of Babylon we have seen that the art of writing—that index of culture—had passed the pictographic stage long before eight thousand years ago, while the Egyptian hieroglyphs, which probably came in with the dynasties, and therefore date from the reign of Menes, the first historical king, are some thirteen hundred years later, so far as their use in the Nile Valley is concerned. Hence the Babylonian script carries the palm in point of age. Fortunately the records of both these ancient civilisations are fairly continuous, of Babylonia to the downfall of the empire, and of Egypt to the present time. Assessing the contributions of each to human progress, the verdict appears to be in favour of Babylonia, and "we now know that, high as was the development of Egyptian civilisation in certain directions, it was by no means the fertile mother of other civilisations. All modern writers are agreed that religious cults and national customs are exactly what the Greeks did not borrow from Egypt, any more than the Hebrews borrowed thence their religion, or the Phoenicians their commerce." (Mr. Percy Gardner's New Chapters in Greek History, p. 193.) But if Egypt was no "house of bondage" to Israel, it has been the enslaver of Christendom. It fettered a faith, which had flourished in the freedom of the spirit, with Trinitarianism, Mariolatry, and Monasticism. Out of one or another of its triads emerged the dogma of the Christian Trinity, and in the child Horus, seated in the lap of Isis, we see the profound significance of the words, "Out of Egypt have I called my Son." The obelisk that fronts St. Peter's at Rome symbolises the historical fact that approach to the Christian Church is through the pronaos of the Egyptian temple.

Explorations in Greece and the surrounding archipelago within the last few years have brought to light a third venerable centre of culture. About thirty years ago Dr. Schliemann, digging in prehistoric soil, believed that he had found the palace of Odysseus and the towers of Ilios. "The bones of Agamemnon are a show." The world laughed at him, but, if it takes a more sober view of his discoveries than Schliemann did, it has come to recognise their value and to prosecute his work. The remarkable result of these discoveries is, in the words of Mr. D. G. Hogarth, to show that "man in Hellas was more highly civilised before history than when history begins to record his state; and there existed human society in the Hellenic area, organised and productive, to a period so remote that its origins were more distant from the age of Pericles than that age is from our own. We have probably to deal with a total period of civilisation in the Ægean not much shorter than in the Nile Valley." (Authority and ArchÆology, p. 230.) The general subject cannot be pursued here, and we have to keep to the narrower track opened up within the past five years in the island of Crete by Mr. Arthur J. Evans. His discoveries there establish (1) the fact of an indigenous culture, and (2) of an active intercourse between Crete and Greece, Egypt, Syria, and other countries centuries before the Phoenicians launched their craft upon the midland sea and trafficked with Cypriote and Cretan, or sailed beyond the Pillars of Hercules. Full accounts of Mr. Evans's important work have for the most part been contributed by him from time to time to the memoirs of learned societies, but no statement in popular form has yet appeared. What now follows will therefore be in large degree an abstract of his paper on "Primitive Pictographs and a PrÆ-Phoenician Script from Crete and the Peloponnese," published in the Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. xiv., Part II., 1894, pp.270-372, and reprinted under the title Cretan Pictographs, 1895.

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Fig. 55.—Vase with incised Characters (Crete)

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Fig. 56.—Incised Characters on Cup (Crete)

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Fig. 57.—Characters on Vase (Crete)

Fig. 58.—Signs on
Bronze Axe (Delphi)

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During a visit to Greece in 1893, Mr. Evans came across some small stones bearing engraved symbols which appeared to be hieroglyphic in character, approximating in form to Hittite, but having features of their own. They were traced to a Cretan source, and inquiry in Berlin elicited the fact that the Imperial Museum there possessed stones of corresponding character, which also came from Crete. With this and other corroborative evidence in hand, Mr. Evans decided to follow up his inquiries on Cretan soil, and began his investigations there in the spring of 1894. He chose the eastern part of the island as the more likely district for discovery of prehistoric remains, because, up to the dawn of history, it had been occupied by the "Eteocretes," or primitive non-Hellenic folk. At Praesos he obtained some stones inscribed with hieroglyphic or pictorial, and also with linear, or quasi-alphabetic, characters, the preservation of those objects through the vast lapse of time since they were engraved being largely due to their use as charms by the Cretan women, who wear these "milk-stones," as they call them, during the period of child-bearing. Where, owing to this superstition, Mr. Evans was unable to secure the stones themselves, he obtained impressions of the characters on them. In exploring GoulÁs, the ruins of which are larger than those of any other prehistoric site, whether in Greece or Italy, Mr. Evans acquired important additions to his collection in the shape (1) of a cornelian gem bearing the image of a rayed sun and a sprig of foliage; (2) of an ox in terra-cotta; and (3) a clay cup on which were three graffito (i.e. rudely scribbled) characters, two of them being identical with the Cypriote pa and lo. A neighbouring hamlet, Prodromos Botzano, yielded a plain terra-cotta vase of primitive aspect with incised hatching round its neck, and three more graffito symbols of the same kind, one of which seemed to represent the double axe-head occurring among the hieroglyphic forms reduced to a linear outline; while the last, as in the clay cup from GoulÁs, was identical with lo. At another village near GoulÁs, Mr. Evans procured a double-headed bronze axe with an engraved symbol, with which he compares signs on a bronze axe from Delphi, the first of these looking like a rude outline of a duck or some other aquatic bird. Some of the walls at KnÔsos bear certain marks which were at first passed by as mere scratchings by masons, but which Mr. Evans is satisfied are taken from a regular script, and fit on, in fact, to the same system as the characters on the pottery and seals, the various positions in which the signs, as e.g. the double axe, appear, warranting the inference that they were engraved on the blocks before these were placed in situ. Neither these nor the signs graven on the steatite and other small stones [Pg 163]
[Pg 164] are the outcome of mere fancy, or of that cacoÊthes scribendi, or "scribbling itch," which wantonly defaces the monuments of past and present times. "Limited as is the number of stones that we have to draw from, it will be found that certain symbols are continually recurring, as certain letters or syllables or words would recur in any form of writing. Thus the human eye appears four times and on as many different stones, the 'broad arrow' seven times, and another uncertain instrument eleven times. The choice of symbols is evidently restricted by some practical consideration, and while some objects are of frequent occurrence, others equally obvious are conspicuous by their absence. But an engraver filling the space on the seals for merely decorative purposes would not thus have been trammelled in his selection." (Jo. Hellenic Studies, p. 300.) Some of the symbols are abbreviated, e.g. the head indicating the whole animal, or a flower the whole plant, thus showing an approach to the ideographic stage of writing. In further example of this there is the expression of ideas and emotions in graphic form, as in the various positions of the arms and hands, and so forth. The symbols also frequently occur in groups of from two to seven, indicating that a syllabic value was given to them, and certain fixed principles of arrangement appear to govern the place of certain signs. Altogether, the conclusion seems warranted that the symbols are not haphazard, but purposive, although, until the materials for [Pg 165]
[Pg 166] judgment have largely increased, the purposes are not easy to particularise. Generally, like all other writing, their object was to tell something, perchance, as already shown (p. 51), information about the avocations of their owners, thus ranking as primitive "merchants' marks."

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Fig. 59.—Signs on Blocks of MycenÆan Buildings (KnÔsos)

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Fig. 60.—Symbols on Three-sided Cornelian (Crete)

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Fig. 61.—Symbols on Four-sided Stone (Crete)

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Fig. 62.—Symbols on Four-sided Stones, with larger faces (Central Crete)

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Fig. 63.—Symbol on Single-faced Cornelian (Eastern Crete)

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Fig. 64.—Symbol on Stone of ordinary MycenÆan type (Athens)

The stones thus bearing symbols of a system of writing in use within the limits of the MycenÆan world in pre-Phoenician times are arranged in five groups by Mr. Evans: (1) three-sided or prism-shaped (Fig. 60); (2) four-sided equilateral (Fig. 61); (3) four-sided with larger faces (Fig. 62); (4) with one engraved side, the upper part being ornamented with a convoluted relief (Fig. 63); (5) stones of ordinary MycenÆan type (Fig. 64).

The Hieroglyphic symbols engraved on the twenty-one stones described and depicted by Mr. Evans number eighty-two, and comprise pictorial and ideographic forms, summarised by him as follows:—

1.	The human body and its parts	6
2.	Arms, implements, and instruments	17
3.	Parts of houses and household utensils	8
4.	Marine subjects	3
5.	Animals and birds	17
6.	Vegetable forms	8
7.	Heavenly bodies and derivatives	6
8.	Geographical or topographical signs	1
9.	Geometrical figures	4
10.	Uncertain symbols	12
	Total:	82

From the foregoing, all of which are represented in Mr. Evans's monograph, these may be selected as examples:—

1. a. IdeÒgraph of a man with arms held downwards, perhaps to denote ownership. Human figures in like position, are frequent on Cypriote cylinders.

b. Ideograph of gesture which may indicate ten or any multiple of ten.

2. a. This type of double axe is non-Egyptian. As a Hittite hieroglyph it has been found on an inscription; it is seen repeated in pairs on a Cypriote cylinder, and it also forms the principal type of some MycenÆan gems found at Crete, in the caves of which island bronze axes of this shape are common in the votive deposits.

b. The "arrow" with a short shaft is frequent, one variety showing the feather shaft. Similar figures are occasionally seen in the field of MycenÆan gems found in the island, where they represent arrows of the chase about to strike wild goats or other animals. The Hittite hieroglyphic series presents some close parallels.

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3. Gate, door, or part of a fence.

4. a. The first of these vessels is accompanied with two crescents, one on either side of the mask, perhaps a sign of time as applied to the duration of the voyage (see p. 51). One ship has seven oars visible, the other six. In form these vessels show a great resemblance to those which appear as the principal type on a class of MycenÆan lentoid gems.

b. Apparently a tunny-fish. Fish as hieroglyphic symbols are common to Egypt and ChaldÆa.

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5. a. Head of he-goat. This symbol presents a remarkable similarity to the Hittite hieroglyph of the same object _ The Egyptian goat's-head sign is of a different character, the neck being given as well as the head, which is beardless. _

b. Bull or ox. The seal on which it occurs is of primitive type.

c. Bird standing. Birds in a somewhat similar position occur among the Hittite symbols at Jerabis and Bulgar Maden, and are frequent in Egyptian hieroglyphics.

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6. a. Vegetable forms, similar to those found on Hittite monuments.

b. Floral symbol. The dot above both examples probably represents the head of a stamen or pistil, as of the lily.

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7. a. Day-star, or sun, with eight revolving rays.

b. Rays. Star-like symbols occur on Syrian and Asianic seal-stones.

c. This symbol, with its swastika-like offshoots, may be of solar import. The concentric circles may be compared with the Egyptian _, Sun with twelve rays, Sep=times, and with the Chinese hieroglyph for sun with its central dot.

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8. Apparently hieroglyphics of mountains and valleys, hence "country" or "land." The Egyptian _ men=mountain, is applied in the same way as a determinative for "districts" and "countries." As _ snut=granary, it reappears, with one or two heaps of corn in the middle, in the simple sense of a "plot of ground." The Akkadian symbol, which also means a plot of ground, exhibits a form _ similar to the above.

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"In this connection," says Mr. Evans, "a truly remarkable coincidence is observable between the pictographic symbolism of old ChaldÆa and that of the Cretans of the MycenÆan period. The linear form of the Akkadian Ut-tu _ shows a sun above the symbol of the ground with a plant growing out of it. But on specimens of MycenÆan gems observed by me in Eastern Crete are seen symbolic or conventional representations of the plant growing out of the ground." (Jo. Hell. Stud., p. 313.)

The Linear signs, although treated separately for purposes of convenience, are regarded by Mr. Evans (see Table I) as fundamentally connected with the hieroglyphic, the one, as in other scripts, overlapping the other. As to this connection, however, some doubt exists. The thirty-two characters which Mr. Evans has detected are increased to thirty-eight by Dr. Tsountas (MycenÆan Age, p. 279), while the materials yielding these results received an important addition through Mr. Evans's discovery, in the spring of 1896, of an inscribed steatite slab, associated with numerous votive objects, in the great cave of Mount Dikta, the fabled birthplace of Zeus. "It consists of a fragment of what may be described as a 'Table of Offerings,' bearing part of what appears to be a dedication of nine letters of probably syllabic values, answering to the same early Cretan script that is seen on the seals, and with two punctuations." (Address of Arthur J. Evans to Section H, Anthropology, of the British Association, 1896; Nature, 1st Oct. 1896, p. 531.)

TABLE I

Table1

These linear forms are inscribed on three-sided seal stones, in every respect resembling those bearing the pictographic signs; on steatite pendants and whorls; and, as already shown, in graffiti on pottery, or inscribed blocks, and so forth, from all which sources Mr. Evans has put together the thirty-two characters shown in Table II, adding corresponding characters from Cypriote and Egyptian scripts. Table III gives examples of the characters—doubtless syllabic—occurring in groups of two or more.

TABLE II

Table2

The hieroglyphic-bearing signet stones have been found solely in the region east of KnÔsos, and the use of these characters appears not to have passed beyond the island; in fact it may have been limited to the less advanced portions. This tells against the direct descent of the Cretan linear from the Cretan pictographic, and, moreover, it is contended by Dr. Tsountas that the pictographic system exercised slight, if any, influence on the Hellenic portion of Greece. But, in the absence of materials which excavations now being prosecuted may bring to light, any definite conclusions are premature, and only the broadest general views permissible. (The archÆological exploration of Crete promises to yield materials of the first importance for knowledge of the history of civilisation in the Eastern Mediterranean area, and the appeal for funds which Mr. Evans and Mr. Hogarth are making should have generous response. Some details of this appeal are printed at the end of this book.) Of the eighty-two pictographic symbols sixteen approach to Egyptian and sixteen to Hittite forms, but all have, none the less, an independent character stamping them as indigenous. Although the coincidences are at times of such a character as to suggest a real affinity, it must be remembered that the similarity in many of the objects to be depicted explains the correspondences between the picture-writing of different peoples. "Some Cretan types present a surprising analogy with the Asianic; on the other hand, many of the most recent of the Hittite symbols are conspicuous by their absence. The parallelism can best be explained by supposing that both systems had grown up in a more or less conterminous area out of still more primitive pictographic elements. In the early picture-writing of a region geographically continuous there may well have been originally many common elements, such as we find among the American Indians at the present day; and when, later, on the banks of the Orontes and the highlands of Cappadocia on the one side, or on the Ægean shores on the other, a more formalised "hieroglyphic" script began independently to develop itself out of these simpler elements, what more natural than that certain features common to both should survive in each? Later inter-communication may have also contributed to preserve this common element. But the symbolic script with which we have here to deal is essentially in situ. The Cretan system of picture-writing is inseparable from the area dominated by the MycenÆan form of culture. Geographically speaking it belongs to Greece." (Jo. Hellen. Stud., p.317.)

TABLE III

Table2

While, as remarked above, the hieroglyph-bearing stones are found only in Crete, examples of the linear character have been found at MycenÆ, Nauplia, and other prehistoric sites in Greece and Egypt. Moreover, as already noted, some of the signs have marked affinities with Cypriote, Hittite, and Semitic.

Among the antiquities which make the Fayum so renowned a district are the remains of two cities; Kahun, which dates from the twelfth dynasty, i.e. 2500 b.c., and Gurob, which is some twelve centuries later, both sites yielding evidence of Asian and Ægean settlers. When digging there ten years ago Professor Flinders Petrie discovered fragments of MycenÆan, or, as he calls it, Ægean, pottery inscribed with characters resembling, and in some cases identical with, those found in Greece. Both the Professor and Mr. Evans agree that the relics unearthed at Kahun are as old as that city; while, speaking of the signs known to be in use 1200 b.c., in a place occupied by people of the Ægean and Asia Minor, Turseni, Akhaians, Hittites, and others, Professor Flinders Petrie remarks that "it will require a very certain proof of the supposed Arabian source of the Phoenician alphabet before we can venture to deny that we have here the origin of the Mediterranean alphabets." (Ten Years' Digging in Egypt, p. 134.) Conversely, scarabs of the twelfth dynasty have been found in Crete, notable among these being one in steatite with a spiral ornament peculiar to that period.

Passing to excavations in the huge mound of Tell-el-Hesy, in Palestine, made up of the ruins of eleven different cities heaped up one above another, we have the discovery, amongst remains of the fourth city, dating about 1450 b.c., of potsherds inscribed with signs similar to the Ægean.

While about twenty per cent. of the Cretan hieroglyphs approach those of the Egyptian in character, twenty out of the thirty-two linear signs there are practically identical with those found in Egypt. Mr. Evans adds that "the parallelism with Cypriote forms is also remarkable, some fifteen agreeing with letters of the Cypriote syllabary."

EGYPTIAN SCARABS, XIITH DYNASTY

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EARLY CRETAN SEAL-STONES

Fig. 65.

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Fig. 65.—Signs on Potsherds at Tell-el-Hesy compared with Ægean Forms

This syllabary, as its name implies, is found in the island of Cyprus,which, lying only sixty miles from Asia Minor, might be expected to yield many traces of active intercourse therewith from prehistoric times. The affinity of its ancient script with those of Western Asia, which may be looked upon as settled, had, therefore, much to commend it at the outset of the inquiry. It stands in nearest relation, possibly as its direct descendant, to the syllabary of the Hittites. References to these people come apace nowadays, and their history has been padded out in portly volumes, but, in truth, we know no more about them than we do about the Phoenicians and Phrygians, which means that we know very little indeed. Through the mists of the past, with the help of such light as is thrown by tablets from Tell-el-Amarna, sculptures from Karnak, and by Hebrew and other records, we have glimpses of a great and powerful empire which stretched from the Euphrates to the Euxine, pushing its borders to the confines of Egypt, against which, on the one hand, and Assyria on the other, it waged war for a thousand years. In 1270 b.c. Rameses III. had to face the onrush of the Hittites and other confederated peoples, whom he defeated at Migdol. They "had overrun Syria. The islands and shores of the Mediterranean gave forth their piratical hordes; the sea was covered with their light galleys, and swept by their strong oars." (Rawlinson's History of Ancient Egypt, vol. ii. p. 271.) According to Dr. Wright, the Hittites appear in history for the first time "in the inscription of Sargon I., King of AganÉ, about 1900 b.c., and disappear from history in the inscriptions of Sargon 717 b.c." (Empire of the Hittites, p. 122.) Until some thirty years ago no monumental remains had come to light concerning an empire whose high place among ancient nations is attested by the discovery of a treaty (the oldest known example of its kind) with Egypt, in which each recognised the other as a power equal in rank to itself, and agreed to help it in case of need. The first Hittite relic, a block of basalt engraved with strange hieroglyphic signs, was found by the traveller Burckhardt in 1812 at Hamah, on the Orontes, but he could not decipher the characters, and the matter was forgotten till 1870, when the stone was rediscovered, and similar relics brought to light. But to this day the key of interpretation is lacking, and scholars await the unearthing of some bilingual monument which shall do for the Hittite hieroglyphs what the Rosetta Stone did for the Egyptian hieroglyphs and the Behistun rock for cuneiform writing. Till this, and more, is effected, we remain in the realm of conjecture about the mighty nation whose beardless soldiers are depicted with daggers in their belts and double-headed axes in their hands on the sculptures of the Nile Valley. Minimising, however, our knowledge of the Hittites to the uttermost, their widely distributed relics evidence their proficiency in certain departments of the arts. They smelted silver and wrought in bronze, they were skilful lapidaries and carvers in ivory, and "the independent system of picture-writing which they possessed offers an obvious source from which the Asianic syllabary might have been obtained." In the Hamah inscriptions the characters are raised, and run in parallel transverse lines.

"The lines of inscriptions and their boundaries are clearly defined by raised bars about four inches apart. The interstices between the bars and characters have been cut away." The inscriptions are read from right to left and vice vers in "boustrophedon" style (bous, "an ox," and strepho, "to turn," therefore, as an ox ploughs), as in ancient Greek modes of writing.

Returning to Crete, we have to consider its relation to the MycenÆan type of civilisation, under which term is included civilisation in pre-Homeric Greece and the Ægean Sea, crossing thence to Hissarlik, the ancient Troy. The spade has made havoc with some of our standard "authorities." Grote refers to the city of MycenÆ only once in his well-known work, and then incidentally speaks of it as the seat of a legendary dynasty. Sir George Cox, in his Mythology of the Aryan Nations, endorses Professor Max MÜller's theory (to which, in part, the veteran philologist still adheres), that the siege of Troy "is a reflection of the daily siege of the East by the solar powers that every evening are robbed of their brightest treasures in the West," and adds that this theory is "supported by a mass of evidence which probably hereafter will be thought ludicrously excessive in amount." The laugh is on the other side now. Schliemann and his successors have broken into the areas within Cyclopean walls whose massive blocks aroused wonder long ages back, giving birth to tales of giant hands that reared them. They have disinterred relics proving an historic element in old traditions, and a nucleus of fact beneath the encrustation of fable over famous names. Like the Empress Helena, who, in searching for the True Cross, of course found that for which she looked, Schliemann too readily assumed that he had discovered the bones of Agamemnon, and the cup from which Nestor drank. But he brought to light the relics of a culture, knowledge of which involves neither more nor less than the re-writing of the history of man in the Eastern Mediterranean, and, by consequence, in Western Europe.

Dealing, as the limits of the subject compel, only with the traces of inscriptions on remains from MycenÆ itself, the earliest to be noted is a stone pestle with one incised character which resembles a Cypriote sign. But one sign does not make an alphabet, and hence the satisfaction at the recent discovery of the handle of a stone vase, apparently of a local material, which has four or five signs engraved upon it, and of the handle of a clay amphora from a chambered tomb in the lower town of MycenÆ with three characters, while a tomb at Prousia, near Nauplia, yielded a genuine MycenÆan vessel with three ears, on each of which is graven a sign resembling the Greek H. These may not suffice to demonstrate the existence of a pre-Phoenician system of writing in Greece, but, taken in conjunction with the numerous discoveries of inscribed signs in Crete, they go far in support of it. What, then, are the facts as thus far, ascertained?

There have been discovered in Crete a number of objects bearing two sorts of writing, one hieroglyphic or pictographic; the other linear and approaching the alphabetic. The pictographic is the older of the two, dating from the earlier part of the third millennium before Christ. It was probably derived from a primitive picture-writing by the non-Hellenic inhabitants of the island, who were called Eteocretans, or "true Cretans," by the Dorians, whose invasion dates, according to the traditional Greek chronology, from about the middle of the twelfth century b.c. These "true Cretans" may not, however, be the aboriginal inhabitants, although as to this, and as to their language, we are in ignorance. The recent discovery of an inscription in an unknown language, written in archaic Greek characters, among the ruins of PrÆsos, the chief Eteocretan settlement, warrants the inference that the old script of the language had been abandoned for the Greek alphabet. That script, the use of which never passed outside the island, obviously had no influence on MycenÆan civilisation.

The linear system is syllabic; perhaps, in some degree, alphabetic. Its possible derivation from the hieroglyphic has been indicated, but although it is a conventionalised form of pictograph, Dr. Tsountas is positive in denying its connection with the Eteocretan. He suggests that its simplification took place in the East, and among a people or peoples not Greek. Thence it was carried into Greek lands, spreading more in the islands, at least in Crete, than in the Peloponnesus or other portions of the mainland, where, as shown above, the number of inscribed objects is exceedingly small. The question is far from ripe for solution, but Professor Flinders Petrie, with whom lies a large share of honour in contributing towards a settlement, courteously permits me to quote the following from a letter on the subject, dated 2nd September 1899: "A great signary (not hieroglyphic, but geometric in appearance, if not in origin) was in use all over the Mediterranean 5000 b.c. It is actually found in Egypt at that period, and was split in two, Western and Eastern, by the cross flux of hieroglyphic systems in Egypt and among the Hittites. This linear signary was developed variously, but retained much in common in different countries. It was first systematised by the numerical values assigned to it by Phoenician traders, who carried it into Greece, whereby the Greek signary was delimited into an alphabet. But the fuller form of the signary survived in Karia with thirty-six signs, and seven more in Iberia, thus giving values to forty-three. This connection of the Iberian with the Karian is striking; so is that of the Egyptian with the West rather than with the East. Signs found in Egypt have thirteen in common with the early Arabian, fifteen in common with Phoenician, and thirty-three in common with Karian and Kelt-Iberian. This stamps the Egyptian signary of the twelfth and eighteenth dynasties as closely linked with the other Mediterranean systems." In an important paper read at the meeting of the British Association, 1899, Professor Flinders Petrie remarks: "We stand therefore now in an entirely new position as to the sources of the alphabet, and we see them to be about thrice as old as had been supposed. That the signs were used for written communications of spelled-out words in the early stages, or as an alphabet, is far from probable. It was a body of signs, with more or less generally understood meanings; and the change of attributing a single letter value to each, and only using signs for sounds to be built into words, is apparently a relatively late outcome of the systematising due to Phoenician commerce." (Jo. Anthrop. Inst., Aug.-Nov., 1899, p. 205.)

Connecting the results of explorations in Asia Minor, Egypt, Crete, Cyprus, Rhodes, Thera, Melos, and other islands of the Eastern Mediterranean with those in the Peloponnesus, the existence of a pre-Phoenician civilisation, of which MycenÆ may be conveniently regarded as the centre, appears to be demonstrated.

That civilisation, so far as its connection with the prehistoric stages of man's development goes, falls in, like aught else in this wide and ancient world, with the doctrine of continuity, but for purposes of time-reckoning dates at latest far back in the third millennium before our era. MycenÆan vases have been found in Egypt, and Egyptian scarabs in MycenÆan deposits. They prove an intimate intercourse between the two countries two thousand five hundred years before Christ. And there was intercourse farther afield. The imitations of Babylonian cylinders, the sculptured palms and lions, the figures of Astarte and her doves, show that fifteen hundred years before the date ascribed to the Homeric poems Assyria and Greece had come into contact. But the examples of Oriental art which had found their way to the soil of Argolis remained more or less exotic, the independent features of MycenÆan art being retained unaltered. Now the cumulative effect of this evidence, which is only baldly summarised here, is to shatter to pieces current theories as to the Phoenician origin of European civilisation, and, consequently, what mainly concerns us here, of the Phoenician origin of the European alphabets through the Egyptian hieratic. For that evidence shows that the MycenÆan civilisation is (1) earlier in time, and (2) indigenous in character.

(1) The evidence as to priority can be summarily stated. Civilisation in the Ægean and on the Greek mainland dates from beyond 3000, b.c., and reached its meridian between the sixteenth and the twelfth centuries of that era. Almost all that we know about the Phoenicians is at second-hand, since, if they ever had a literature or native chronicles, these have not survived. Piecing together classical tradition and references in Egyptian and Hebrew records, we gather that for some three centuries onwards from 1600 b.c. Phoenicia was a dependency of the Pharaohs. There was a Tyrian quarter at Memphis 1250 b.c. Hiram appears to have refounded Tyre 1028 b.c., from which time its commercial importance dates; while the refounding of its future great rival Carthage is assigned to the early years of the eighth century b.c. The decay of the MycenÆan civilisation, which followed as one of the many results of the Dorian invasion in the twelfth century b.c., gave the Phoenicians their chance. They overran the Ægean, and remained the dominant power in the Mediterranean until the Greeks, reviving their ancient traditions, expelled the Phoenicians from their waters, and broke their supremacy when Tyre was sacked by Alexander the Great, 332 b.c. Between their rise and fall, their commercial pre-eminence enabled them to impose upon the Greeks the alphabet which was the vehicle of preservation of the intellectual wealth of the Hellenes, and of all literature that followed theirs. What were the probable sources of that alphabet will be considered presently.

(2) After allowing full play for Asian and Egyptian influences, the fact abides that there was a well-developed native MycenÆan art. The decoration of the pottery is non-Oriental and non-Egyptian; the seaweeds and marine creatures depicted are home-products of the island world of Greece; and where sacred trees and pillars appear, we have no Semitic element, but the outcome, as Mr. Evans puts it, of a "religious stage widely represented on primitive European soil, and nowhere more persistent than in the West." But if there were stepping-stones between Argolis and Syria in the islands that lay between, there was continuous passage on the western side, making MycenÆ a link between East and West. The breaks formerly assumed between the Old and the New Stone Ages of prehistoric Europe have been filled up by the accumulation of evidence as to man's continuous tenure of that continent since his primitive ancestors crossed thither by now vanished land-routes from Northern Africa. In like manner the Mirage Orientale, as M. Salomon Reinach happily terms it, of a metal-introducing people from the East, who, in successive racial waves, swept the older settlers before them into the remotest corners of the north-west, has vanished. When once peopled, Europe, like Asia and America, ran on independent lines of development, which, however, were not isolated from connecting lines approaching from the East. The striking facts of the use of common trade-signs along both shores of the Mediterranean, and of the existence of remains of MycenÆan monuments in Sardinia, are in keeping with other facts, showing how close was the contact between one part of Europe and another centuries before the Phoenicians had left the shores of the Persian Gulf for the Syrian seaboard. They prepare us for acceptance of the new theory of "an Ægean culture rising in the midst of a vast province extending from Switzerland and Northern Italy through the Danubian basin and the Balkan peninsula, and continued through a large part of Anatolia, till it finally reaches Cyprus." (Evans, Address Brit. Assoc.; Nature, 1st Oct. 1896, p. 529.) They prepare us for the fact that in the Bronze Age, if Scandinavia and its borderlands were the source of amber, the supply of gold for Northern and Central Europe was drawn not from the Ural, but from Ireland.

The centre whence this "Ægean" culture is held to have been diffused is denoted by its name. That name, however, covers the Eastern Mediterranean region, and the question arises whether or not some precise place in that area can be indicated as the cradleland. "Hellas," says Herodotus, "was formerly called Pelasgix" (ii. 56), and this pre-Hellenic Greece was inhabited by Barbarians or Pelasgians, as they are, with equal vagueness, called. There were "Pelasgians" on the mainland and the islands; "the whole of Peloponnesus took the name of Pelasgia; the kings of Tiryns were Pelasgians, and Æschylus calls Argos a Pelasgian city; Pausanias (viii. 4, 6) says that the Arcadians spoke of Pelasgus as the first man who lived in that country, wherefore, in his reign, it was called Pelasgia; an old wall at Athens was attributed to the Pelasgians, and the people of Attica had from all time been so called. Lesbos also was called Pelasgia, and Homer knew of Pelasgians in the Troad. Their settlements are further traced to Egypt, to Rhodes, Cyprus, Epirus—where Dodona was their ancient shrine—and, lastly, to various parts of Italy." (Keane's Man Past and Present, p. 505.) Herodotus has little to say in favour of the Barbarians (which he uses as a descriptive and not a contemptuous term, the name being given by Greeks to all foreigners whose language was not Greek); he speaks of them as rude, of uncouth speech, and worshippers of repellent deities. Wachsmuth, in his Historical Antiquities of the Greeks, published over sixty years ago, says that "numerous traditionary accounts, of undoubted authenticity, describe them as a brave, moral, and honourable people, which was less a distinct stock and tribe than a race united by a resemblance in manners and the forms of life." Professor Keane fitly calls these "remarkable words," in view of the recent discoveries in prehistoric Greece, which warrant us in ascribing to the Pelasgians the development of culture in the Ægean Sea. But in what island, or on what part of the mainland? The important character of the finds at MycenÆ directs quest thither at the start. The dÉbris of that city, and of her elder-sister city, Tiryns, have yielded varied relics of an ancient culture, from gold-masked skeletons in vaulted tombs to gorgeously decorated palaces and Cyclopean ruins of walls and fortresses. But there are traditions that these Argolic cities are of later date than Homer's "great city of Knossos" in Crete, wherein "Minos, when he was nine years old, began to rule, he who held converse with the great Zeus, and was the father of my father, even of Deucalion, high of heart," traditions pointing to the existence of an important Cretan kingdom which flourished before Agamemnon ruled in MycenÆ.

Water is the birthplace of civilisation, as of life itself, and the original home of the Ægean or MycenÆan civilisation is probably to be found in the island of Crete. It is crammed with remains of pre-Hellenic culture. It is a big stepping-stone from Greece to Asia Minor, Karpathos and Rhodes lying between. It is in the line of communication with Cyprus, Syria, and Egypt on the East, and with Sicily and the coastlines of the Western Mediterranean. The earliest Greek tradition looks back to Crete "as the home of divinely inspired legislation and the first centre of maritime dominion." And, what is of the highest moment to remember, so far as the origin of the art of navigation in Ægean waters goes, there can be no question between the old claims on behalf of the Phoenicians and the present claims on behalf of Crete. The Syrian seaboard is harbourless and unsheltered; the men who first braved the "unvintaged wine dark" waters (how fine are all the Homeric sea-words) were island-dwellers, shooting forth from snug creek and harbour on quick and sudden enterprise, and growing bolder and bolder as they sailed by the rising and setting of the stars and the recurring moon. "The early sea-trade of the inhabitants of the island world of the Ægean gave them a start over their neighbours, and produced a higher form of culture, which was destined to react on that of a vast European zone, nay, even upon that of the older civilisations of Egypt and Asia." (Evans, Address, B. Assoc., p. 530.) For the diffusion of culture throughout the Ægean was followed by expeditions to the East. While Cyprus yielded the metal to which it has given its name, the gold of Asia Minor was poured into the lap of the pre-Hellenes, and moulded into forms of beauty through which their own artistic skill challenged comparison with that of the Oriental. In his comment on the source of the MycenÆan civilisation Mr. Frazer aptly remarks that "the existence at this early date of a great maritime power in Crete, which by its central position between Greece and the empires of the East was well fitted to receive and amalgamate the characteristics of both, is just what is needed to explain the rise and wide diffusion of a type of civilisation like the MycenÆan, in which Oriental influences seem to be assimilated and transmuted by a vigorous and independent nationality endowed with a keen sense of its own for art. The spade will probably one day decide the question of priority between Argolis and Crete, but in the meantime the probability appears to be that the MycenÆan civilisation rose in Crete and spread from it as a centre, and that it was not until the Cretan power was on the wane that the palmy days of Tiryns and MycenÆ began." (Commentary on Pausanias, vol. iii. p. 151.) The MycenÆan civilisation perished in a great catastrophe. Somewhere near the middle of the twelfth century b.c. the Dorian invaders in their southward march reached the walls of Tiryns and MycenÆ, and sacked and gave those cities to the flames. Then began for Greece "the long dark ages, the mediÆval epoch, out of which she emerges only in the Homeric Renaissance." The flower of the survivors of that dread time sought a new home east of the Ægean on the isles and shores of Ionia. There these exiles from Argolis laid the foundation of a culture whose influence will abide while the world stands, because Ionia remains the fatherland of all who hold dear what man has reached in art and literature, in science and philosophy.

The fall of MycenÆ gave Phoenicia her opportunity, and she was quick to seize it in establishing depÔts throughout the Ægean, and in securing the overlordship of the Mediterranean. But through her lack of political unity, and her dependence on mercenary aid when troubles came, finally she succumbed to the strong arm of the reinvigorated Greek. Between their rise and decline the Phoenicians had put the alphabet into, practically, its present form, and secured its adoption by the Greeks. But if they did not derive it from the Egyptian hieratic, whence came it?

No definite answer is forthcoming, and perhaps never will be. Canon Rawlinson is not alone in thinking that it will probably never be settled whether the Phoenician characters are modifications of the Egyptian or the Hittite or of Cypriote, or mere abbreviated forms of a picture-writing peculiar to the Phoenicians. That opinion was expressed before the discovery of the Cretan pictographs and linear signs, and these have not settled the question. The Phoenicians came under various influences, and their adaptive character readily took the impress of their surroundings. Probably they had a long history before they appear in Syria. As Semites, they were presumably familiar with cuneiform. The Tyrian quarter at Memphis was one of many settlements where the Egyptian characters would be in use, or, at least, familiar. And when the Phoenicians came into the Ægean they found an ancient script whereby intercourse was facilitated along the Mediterranean, a script of which so pliant a people, eager for trade, would avail themselves. In view of all these probabilities, Mr. Evans remarks that it is at least worth while weighing "the possibility that the rudiments of the Phoenician writing may after all have come in part at least from the Ægean side. The more the relics of MycenÆan culture are revealed to us, the more we see how far ahead of their neighbours on the Canaanite coasts was the Ægean population in arts and civilisation." The spread of their commerce led them to seek plantations in the Nile Valley and the Mediterranean outlets of the Arabian and Red Sea trade. The position was the reverse of that which meets our eye at a later date. It was not Sidon that was then planting mercantile settlements on the coasts and islands of Greece." (Jo. Hellen. Stud., p. 368.) Whether, per contra, a Semitic element had been introduced into the Ægean is uncertain, but could this be proved, the presence of similarities between the respective scripts would have easy explanation. Putting together, however, what is no longer conjectural, it would seem that the Phoenician alphabet was a compound from various sources, the selection and modification of the several characters being ruled by convenience, and that, primarily and essentially, commercial. Like all business people immersed in many transactions, their method was brevity, and so they aimed as near "shorthand" as they could. They got rid of surplus signs, of the lumber of determinatives and the like, and invented an alphabet which if it was not perfect (as no alphabet can be, because the letters are not revised from time to time to represent changes in sound), was of such signal value as to have been accepted by the civilised world of the past, and to have secured, with but slight modifications, a permanence assured to no other invention of the human race. Therefore, the debt that we owe these old traders is in nowise lessened because the current theory of derivation of our alphabet is doubted. This theory as to the nature of the service rendered by the Phoenicians has corroboration in an ancient Cretan tradition recorded by DiodÔros, a contemporary of Julius CÆsar and Augustus, to which Mr. Evans makes reference in the reprint of his essay. According to that tradition, the Phoenicians had not invented written characters, but had simply "changed their shapes." In other words, they had not done more than improve on an existing system, which is precisely what recent evidence goes to show. "We may infer from the Cretan contention recorded by DiodÔros that the Cretans claimed to have been in possession of a system of writing before the introduction of the Phoenician alphabet. The present discovery on Cretan soil both of a pictographic and a linear script dating from times anterior to any known Phoenician contact thus affords an interesting corroboration of this little regarded record of an ancient writer." (Cretan Pictographs, p. 372.)