DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.9804#0173
THE MINOAN SCRIPTS 147
scripts of Knossos offer us material in abundance, and
there is a certain amount of it, though not so much,
at Phsestos and Hagia Triada ; but we have no means
of deciphering it. The intercourse between Crete and
Egypt, close as it was, was hardly of the political nature
that would involve bilingual inscriptions. It was be-
cause Greek and Egyptian, Persian and Babylonian lived
under the same government, that we possess the Rosetta
stone and the great inscriptions of Behistun. It is
almost too much to hope for that Egyptian will do for
prehistoric Greece what, a century ago, Classical Greek
did for Egypt. Nor do we possess a series of proper
names, like the list of the Achamienid Kings, which led
Grotefend and Rawlinson along a sure chain of inference,
and enabled them, without any bilingual clues, to decipher
Old Persian.1 Minos is a poor stock-in-trade with which
to start operations !
When Mr. Evans publishes the full material, as he
hopes shortly to do,! it will be seen that he has established
certain preliminary points. He has satisfied himself
that whereas the pictographic script was written either
right to left, or " boustrophedon," or left to right, the
first class of linear script runs generally, and the second
class always, in the last direction. This method of
writing from left to right had indeed become so fixed at
this latter period that symbols which still retain something
of their pictographic form, and can be regarded as
" facing " one way or the other, face towards the right
without apparently conveying any ambiguity as to the
direction in which they are to be read. In Egyptian,
which can be written indifferently right to left or left
to right, the symbols always face the direction from which
the inscription is to be read. In the Cretan inventory
lists, on the other hand, the totals are placed on the
right, even although the figures face that way, and it is
1 For a good account of this sec Sayce, A.C.I. 1907, pp. 1-35.
2 Through the Clarendon Press, Oxford.
scripts of Knossos offer us material in abundance, and
there is a certain amount of it, though not so much,
at Phsestos and Hagia Triada ; but we have no means
of deciphering it. The intercourse between Crete and
Egypt, close as it was, was hardly of the political nature
that would involve bilingual inscriptions. It was be-
cause Greek and Egyptian, Persian and Babylonian lived
under the same government, that we possess the Rosetta
stone and the great inscriptions of Behistun. It is
almost too much to hope for that Egyptian will do for
prehistoric Greece what, a century ago, Classical Greek
did for Egypt. Nor do we possess a series of proper
names, like the list of the Achamienid Kings, which led
Grotefend and Rawlinson along a sure chain of inference,
and enabled them, without any bilingual clues, to decipher
Old Persian.1 Minos is a poor stock-in-trade with which
to start operations !
When Mr. Evans publishes the full material, as he
hopes shortly to do,! it will be seen that he has established
certain preliminary points. He has satisfied himself
that whereas the pictographic script was written either
right to left, or " boustrophedon," or left to right, the
first class of linear script runs generally, and the second
class always, in the last direction. This method of
writing from left to right had indeed become so fixed at
this latter period that symbols which still retain something
of their pictographic form, and can be regarded as
" facing " one way or the other, face towards the right
without apparently conveying any ambiguity as to the
direction in which they are to be read. In Egyptian,
which can be written indifferently right to left or left
to right, the symbols always face the direction from which
the inscription is to be read. In the Cretan inventory
lists, on the other hand, the totals are placed on the
right, even although the figures face that way, and it is
1 For a good account of this sec Sayce, A.C.I. 1907, pp. 1-35.
2 Through the Clarendon Press, Oxford.