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)

no SCRIPTA MINOA

bark documents, and the Minoan script of prehistoric Crete would very naturally

be confounded with ' Phoenician' characters. The tablets, as we have seen, had been

generally placed in wooden chests, of which only charred fragments remained,

often, apparently, deposited in stone cists—either gypsum or, in the case of the inscribed

Lead-lined tablets in the Temple Repository, of limestone. But the stone cists or jcacre'XXcu? of

fiseYwitii tne f*a'ace presented one remarkable feature which has been ascertained in a series

■chests of of examples, and was possibly common to all. The}' were lined with lead sheeting.

' Some inner casing, then, of this material may account in the most natural way for the

statement that the mysterious documents found at Knossos in Nero's time were

contained in a 'chest of tin'.1

1 Prologus, 1. H,' in stannea arcula.' In the dedicatory have almost infallibly led an ancient observer to describe

epistle it is described as 'locuiumstannoaffabre clausum'. it as tin {plumbum album) rather than lead (plumbum

It may be observed that the white appearance of the nigrum).
decomposed metal, as seen in the Knossian cists, would