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)

PROTODYNASTIC EGYPTIAN AND EGYPTO-LIBYAN INFLUENCES 121

seal' is the immediate predecessor of a more elongated form which occasionally
bears three 'hieroglyphic' inscriptions. The pear or carafe-shaped type, again, is
the direct forerunner of a more elegant class of signets which, like the elongated
prism, is in a special way associated with the hieroglyphic characters. The material
used for the seals of the early deposits is almost exclusively soft stone or ivory,
but the pear-shaped type of signet was occasionally cut out of rock crystal.'

The commercial intercourse existing during this early period between Crete Egypto-

objects, and the still more intimate relationship brought out by the Hagia Triada
images and amulets, leads us to a very interesting aspect of the present inquiry.
A comparison of certain early Cretan seals, and of a series of figures and decorative

designs presented by them, with a special
Nilotic class of seals and seal-types, will
be found to add many new links to this
chain of connexion. The parallelism thus supply a
established is indeed of the highest im- f0gicai
portance, not only in its bearing on the terminus
origins of Minoan culture, but as affording
some approximate guide to the chrono-
logical place of the Cretan seals of the
primitive pktographic class. And inas-
much as these pictographic seal-types are
the immediate predecessors of the more
conventionalized class exhibiting the hiero-
glyphic script, we have here at the same time a terminus a quo for dating the period
during which this conventionalized pictorial script arose in the island.

The earliest type of seal in Egypt appears to have been the cylinder, also Egyptian
common to Babylonia. The cylinder was indeed the prevailing form till the early part ^l]nder
of the Twelfth Dynasty, when it began to be superseded by the scarab. The frequent
appearance of the standard of Neith, the Libyan Goddess, on a class of cylinders that
was in vogue before the First Dynasty, must be taken to connect them with the Western Connexion
Delta.2 On the other hand, the close parallelism existing between the early types of jpjjjljf1*
Egyptian cylinder and the primitive Chaldaean tends to show that this form of seal
had first made its way into the Lower Nile Valley from the Asiatic side. This
association of the cylinder type in Egypt with the primitive population of the
Delta helps us to assign a source to a special class of these3 which stands apart
from the ordinary series with hieroglyphic inscriptions, and seems to represent a sur-
vival throughout the early dynastic period of some indigenous element.

Fig. 54. Pear-shaped Signet of Black Steatite: Early
Minoan, Central, Crete. [$.]

1 One such specimen was found in the Hagia Triada stable, 1906, p. 51. Mr. Newberry lays stress on the part
ossuary. Another was seen by me in Candia. played by the Delia population in the introduction of the

1 See Percy Newberry, Scarabs, an Introduction to the cylinder type into Egypt.
Study of Egyptian Seals and Signet Rings: London, Con- ' See my Furtlier Discoveries, &c, pp. 364 seqq.
Q2