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)

LINEAR SCRIPT OF CLASS A 29

stone cist or repository lying beneath a later pavement. This contained the fittings of Examples
a small Palace Shrine, including a marble cross of orthodox Greek shape, and exquisite „ Ten}PIe
vases, reliefs, and figures in native faience, among which were the Goddess with the tories.
snakes and her votaries.1 Here, together with a variety of sealings showing the
highest development of naturalistic art in gem engraving, was a rectangular clay
tablet, and disks and labels engraved with linear characters of this class.2 An early
magazine to the South-West, which lay beneath another later floor,3 produced a char-
acteristic pot with an inscription of the same style,4 while a still more interesting find

i

j

Fig. 12. Ink-written Inscription inside Cup.

took place in the South-East part of the site. Here, immediately above the Pillar Cups with
Chamber belonging to the early part of the Middle Minoan Age, in which, as already ^^.tten
noticed, hieroglyphic sealings had occurred, was a floor-level, upon which were found tions.
several characteristic vessels of the Third Middle Minoan class. Among these were
two cups exhibiting round their inner surface ink-written inscriptions of this same
linear class.5 These inscriptions, one of which is here reproduced in Fig. 12, were
apparently executed by a reed pen before the final firing of the clay.

It may be said that wherever there was any distinct stratification observable the

1 ' Knossos,' Report, 1903, pp. 38 seqq.

appreciated when this preliminary

s Ibid., p. 52.

written.

s 'Knossos,' Report, 1901, pp. 9-12. But the strati-

' Ibid., p. 10.

jraphic conditions of this discovery were not rightly

s ' Knossos,' Report, 1902, pp. 107 seqq.