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)

8o

SCRIPTA MINOA

Did the
Philistines
contribute
to forma-

Phoenician
alphabet ?

Greek
'Phoinikes"

Aegean
'Red Men'.

Unex-
plained

cuneiform
writing in
Canaan.

' if an envoy come from Egypt, who is able to read, he will read your name upon
the tombstone'.1 But the most striking passage in this connexion is where the
Philistine Prince has the archives of his forefathers brought out,2 containing
methodical lists of the gifts of Egyptian Kings, as well as of their value, amounting
to 1,000 Deben. He might have been a Minoan King of Knossos.

It may well be asked if some inherited knowledge of this kind, passed on from
their enterprising neighbours—whose settlements extended as far South as Dor and
the promontory of Carmel—may not, at least, have contributed towards the invention
of the Phoenician alphabet.3

Of the extent of these influences on Phoenician civilization, as a whole, there can
no longer be any question. Phoenician art itself may, in many respects, be described
as decadent Minoan,* and the enterprising sea-craft ofSidon and of Tyre hardly sprang
from a Semitic source. There is evidence that the Greek name Phoinikes or ' Red
Men' had once a wider significance, and was originally applied to the dark or
red-skinned Aegean race, of which we have now the living portrayal in the Cup-bearer
and his fellows of the Knossian Palace.0 It is highly pertinent to observe that the
Egyptians in Ptolemaic times applied to the Phoenicians the name of Keftiu, which
had originally betokened the men of the Isles of the Sea."

In the fourteenth century b.c., as is shown by the Tell el-Amarna tablets,
cuneiform writing was still in general use in Syria and Canaan, and, so far at least as
Syria is concerned, this usage continued down to about noo B.C.7 Whence, then,
are we to trace the impulse which, during the immediately ensuing period, resulted
in the evolution of the Semitic letters?

It is clear that the earliest forms of some of the Greek letters—the Boeotian Eta
for example—point to prototypes more archaic than any to be found in the most
ancient Canaanite inscriptions, such as the Moabite Stone, dating from about 900 b.c.
It follows, therefore, that the origin of the Phoenician letters must at any rate go

1 W. Max MQller, Pap. Golenischeff, p. 24.

* Ibid., p. so.

' In my first work on ' Pictographs', 1895, pp. 95-7
[364-6], and cf, Table III, I had already been led by the
'altogether startling' parallels between certain Cretan
and Semitic forms to make this suggestion, to which I
returned in ' The Palace of Knossos in its Egyptian
relations' (Arch. Rep. of Eg. Expl. Fund, 1899-1900, p. 181).
Since the discovery of the advanced linear scripts A and
B, the question has been put on a wholly new basis.
Some further reasons in favour of the Minoan-Philistine
derivation of the Phoenician letters were advanced by me
in a course of lectures on ' Pre-Phoenician Writing in
Crete', given at the Royal Institution in January, 1903,
especially in Lecture III (summary in Times, Feb. 2,
1903). To M. Salomon Reinach {Anthropologie, xi. p. 409)
is due an early recognition of the plausibility of this
hypothesis. Cf., too, S. A. Fries (Zeitschr. d. D. Palaestina-
Vereins, 1900, pp. 118-26), whose knowledge of my work,
however, appears to have been derived through the

refracting medium of Dr. Kluge's ' Schrift der Mykenier',
M. Rend Dussaud (Journ. Asiatique, 1905, i. p. 357 seqq.)
also combats the Semitic view.
* S. Reinach observes (Les Celtes dans ks Vallees du P6

etre question de
ais setilement de

See too M. Rei-
and my ' Eastern
to Anthr. Sect, of

et du Danube, p. 226), ' II ne peut pii
civilisation phenicienne a Mycenes
civilisation mycenienne en Phenicie/
nach's Mirage Oriental, pp. 721 seqq.
Question in Anthropology' (Addres
Brit. Assoc, Liverpool, 1896, p. 14).

0 Fick, Vorgriechische Orlsnatnen, p. 123. The same
suggestion had independently occurred to me. Prof. R.
Burrows (The Discoveries in Crete, p. 142) remarks,' It was
always puzzling on the assumption that Cadmus, son of
Phoenix, was a Semite, that his sister was Europa, and
her nephew Minos."

6 H. R. Hall, B. S. A., viii. pp. 163,164.

' The cuneiform script stili prevailed in Syria, accord-
ing to W. Max Mflller, under the Nineteenth and Twentieth
Dynasties (Miltk. der vorderasiat. Gesch., iii. p. 40, &c).