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)

Series of
tablets

referring
to axes.

Hoard

of the
Arsenal.

Arrow as
counter-
mark.

Methodical
arrange-
ment.

SCRIPTA MINOA

a clay mass which no doubt owed its formation to the dissolvent effects of moisture
on what had originally been a much larger deposit of inscribed tablets. They were
moreover accompanied by fragments oi decayed gypsum, apparently belonging to
a small coffer of that material in which they had been contained. What remained of
the tablets themselves was in a very bad state, but with the aid of a plaster backing
I was able to raise a series which were lying on their faces in a regular file, and thus
to preserve a record of their original arrangement in the gypsum chest (see Fig. 21).
From the pictorial figures, added to the linear inscriptions on these, it appears that
they referred to bronze single-edged axes.

The circumstances of the finding of another large hoard of tablets in a magazine—
connected apparently with the Arsenal—on the paved Minoan Way, West of the
Palace,1 show that the objects referred to on the tablets were sometimes stored close
by them. The pictorial signs on the tablets of this deposit referred to the frames and
wheels of chariots, spears or lances, the horns of wild goats used in the manufacture
of the Cretan bows, and also arrows—two large lots of which, of 6,010 and 2,630, or
8,640 in all, are the subject of one record. It was, therefore, specially interesting
to discover in the immediate neighbourhood of these tablets two actual depots of
arrows lying at a distance of about three metres from one another. The deposits had,
in each instance, been contained in wooden boxes with bronze loop-handles (like those
of the chests containing the chariot tablets mentioned above), and, embedded in the
remains of the chests, were the carbonized shafts, and, still partly attaching to them,
the bronze heads of hundreds of arrows.

Here again, as in other cases, together with the charred fragments of the chests,
were found the clay sealings with which their string binding had been secured (Fig. 22).
These sealings were three-sided, the string passing through their major axis. Both
chests had been secured in an identical manner with three variant sealings, each
of which was duplicated. The signet used exhibited a carelessly engraved design
of a couchant lion, and this had been impressed on the principal face of all the clay
sealings. In one case the smaller sides of the sealing (due to the pinching in of the
clay nodule by the finger and thumb) were both of them plain, and the lion device
appeared on the principal face without' a countermark. In the second variety this
design is cancelled by the arrow sign, doubtless referring to the contents of the chest,
while the two smaller sides of the sealing are countersigned in the linear script, the
' Throne and Sceptre' sign suggestively appearing at the beginning of one signature.
The third variety shows the lion type without the arrow mark, and a signature on only
one of the minor faces of the sealing.

The bureaucratic method and elaborate system of control here exemplified are
constantly perceptible in the contents and arrangement of these Minoan archives.
The tablets, as we have seen, were carefully filed, and it appears moreover that some of

1 ' Knossos,' Report, 1904, pp. 54 seqq. It has already arrows to which soin
been noted (see p. 40 above) that the tablets and the basement from the n