Evans, Arthur J.: Scripta minoa: the written documents of minoan Crete with special reference to the archives of Knossos (Band 1): The hieroglyphic and primitive linear classes (Oxford, 1909)

vi PREFACE

For these reasons the First Part of the present volume has been devoted
to a summary view of all the successive types of Minoan script, including the
primitive pictographic, the hieroglyphic, and the advanced linear classes.
Their genesis is traced from a widespread European family of immemorial
antiquity, and the place occupied by them among other early forms of
writing traceable throughout the Mediterranean basin is as far as possible
defined.

Following on the clue first given me by some hieroglyphic seal-stones in
1893, the course of the discoveries on Cretan soil is here sketched out, leading
up to the dramatic fulfilment of my most sanguine expectations on the Palace
hill of Knossos. The archaeological evidence produced by the various
deposits in which the successive types of script occurred—primitive picto-
graphic, hieroglyphic, and the advanced linear of Classes A and B—is
brought to bear on their historic sequence. The equations, moreover,
supplied by the association of certain Egyptian relics in the same or parallel
strata are shown to supply some fixed chronological points of the greatest
value.

Some interesting evidence is here brought together indicating a late
survival of the knowledge of writing in the decadence of Minoan and
Mycenaean culture, and the abiding traditions of its former existence among
the later Eteocretans who represented the remains of the indigenous stock
in Hellenic times. On the other hand, attention is called in Part I,
Section 13 to a curious record which may be certainly taken to show that

elsewhere (Essai de Classification des Epoqites de
la Civilisation minoemte), the term ' Minoan' has at
least the advantage of not transgressing the limits of
ethnographic neutrality. To make use o( ' Minos'
like Caesar or Pharaoh does not raise the vexed
questions of Carians and Pelasgians, of the Achaeans,
or even the Libyans. There may of course have
been more than one early dynasty in prehistoric
Crete, but the course of its civilization as a whole is
continuous and homogeneous. The great Age of
the Cretan Palaces, moreover, suggests the idea ol
a centralized and dynastic government. The word
' Minoa' moreover, applied by the Greeks to so many
early colonial offshoots of Crete from Gaza to
Western Sicily, seems to reflect the enterprise of its
great prehistoric Age—when the sea-power of the
Lords of Knossos was predominant throughout a large
part of the Mediterranean basin. The archaeological

corroboration of this conclusion is now coming out
in the discovery of imported ' Minoan' objects
from Palestine to Sicily and Spain.

It is true that my friend Professor Ridgeway, with
his accustomed loyalty, has informed me that he is
going to oppose the view that Minos I or II had any
connexion with the great Palace Period of Knossos.
He would bring the first Minos (with Diodoros, he
distinguishes two), as the destroyer of the Palace, at
the head of the first wave of fair-haired invaders in
the .Egean.

Surely this is very hard on Minos. I cananswerit
by one argttmentum ad hoininem. It was Minos not
as destroyer but as builder of his Palace-shrine, the
Labyrinth,and patron of the great craftsman, Daedalos,
who led me to the site of Knossos. Had I not taken
another view of ancient tradition this book at any
rate would not have been written.