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)

SEALS AND SEALINGS.—CLASS A 137

Egypt about the middle of the Twelfth Dynasty, and continued in vogue during the type with
immediately ensuing period. It is a characteristic of the earlier class of these amethyst J^™?"
scarabs that they were usually left plain below, their base being subsequently covered glyphs.
by a gold plate, upon which the device or inscription was incised. This was, naturally,
often lost, or it was never added, so that plain amethyst scarabs of this period are of
frequent occurrence, and more than one specimen has been found in Crete. That
scarabs of this class were occasionally made use of by the insular engravers had
already been made apparent from a specimen found in the Hagios Onuphrios Deposit,
the base of which has been simply decorated with three circles by a native hand.1
The present example is of much greater interest, for the field has been here engraved
with three characters—namely, a solar or stellar symbol (No. 108 in the list of
hieroglyphs below)—consisting of concentric circles and revolving rays, and a beaked
vase (No. 47 below), twice repeated,—both of these signs being drawn from the
regular repertory of the conventionalized pictographic or hieroglyphic script. The
form of the vases answers to that on the earlier series, and has led me to place this
amethyst scarab seal in Class A. It is the only seal of hard material in this series,
and the rudeness of the work shows that it belongs to a time when Minoan seal-
engravers were only beginning to attack hard stones. The attempt may well have
been due to their having had this amethyst scarab of Egyptian fabric ready to
hand.

We thus see that Cretan seals of Class A, presenting the hieroglyphic script in Class A
its early stage, supply internal evidence of interrelation with Egyptian scarab types of %oeJi.back,
the Middle Empire. It would even appear that the earliest Cretan seals presenting the Dynasty.
first stage of the true hieroglyphic stage must be carried back to the beginning of
that period, and to the Eleventh rather than the Twelfth Dynasty. The more primitive
examples of the elongated prism-seals, in fact, fit on very closely to the dumpier
pictographic class, which belongs to the close of the 'Ossuary Period', and, as has
been shown above in Table XII, still bears traces of the Sixth Dynasty types of
Egyptian button-seals.

This conclusion receives a striking corroboration from the discovery—already Seal-im-
referred to above2—of clay seal-impressions, exhibiting the hieroglyphic script in its ^ rfass a
archaic stage, in certain stratified deposits belonging to the Earliest Palace period at from M. M.
Knossos. Thus the two sealings, P. 15, 16 below, presenting characters of a broad atKnossos
primitive type, were found in the SE. Pillar Room on a floor-level belonging to the
First Middle Minoan period, and associated with polychrome pottery of the early
'geometric' class that characterizes this epoch. They were separated, moreover, by
a distinct floor-level from the immediately overlying stratum containing poly-
chrome pottery of the more advanced fabric, that marks the Second Middle Minoan
period.

But a new fixed point in this connexion has now been supplied by the Abydos Tomb,3 The new
containing inscribed cylinders of Senusert (Sesostris) III, and Amenemhat III, in ^Middle

1 See Cretan Pktographs, &c, p. 56 [357], and Supplement, p. 105. - See above, p. 19. s See p. 19,

S 2