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)

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ANALYSIS OF THE HIEROGLYPHIC SIGNARY 237

of Crete was already by the days of Sesostris a valued article of import in the land of
the Pharaohs, and at Abydos the general furniture of a rich Egyptian includes an
elegant Minoan vase.

It cannot then surprise us that, as shown above, certain Cretan types of signet,
such as the half-cylinders, the ' button'-seals, and with them the three- and four-
sided bead-seals, the earliest vehicles of the Conventionalized Pictographic script, should
correspond with types existing in the Nile Valley, nor that in certain cases there
should be an undoubted interrelation in the figures or patterns that these seals
present. More than one Egyptian scarab of Twelfth Dynasty date has been found in
Crete, and at any rate from the Thirteenth Dynasty onwards, as we know from the
discovery of the diorite figure of Wazd User and the lid of Khyan, Egyptian hiero-
glyphic inscriptions must have been familiar to the
Ol ^^1 Pi denizens of the Cretan palaces.
* -^^^ I [j In Crete, with the establishment of what seems to Imitation

have been a highly organized dynastic government hierogW-3"
under the Minoan priest-kings, it is natural to suppose phic style
that the same striving after stately monumental expres- dynasts?3"
L> Q s*on may nave produced a similar result in the use of
. ^ a glyptic official script. Moreover, when the very

C M&£^^§T\ car'y evidences of relations between Crete and the

JP^^T Nile Valley are fully realized, it cannot be thought sur-

prising that Egyptian models should in this, as in so
TABLE XV. Fi^.10-4. many other respects, have been exercising a formative

ComparativeGroupsofy, Leg,andGate. influence.

To a certain extent it is possible to watch the actual transformation of the earlier Trans-
linear class of signs in Crete under the influence of the decorative glyptic style. It is, Qf™riier
moreover, specially interesting to observe that on some of the earlier three-sided seals linear
of the same elongated class as that with which the Conventionalized Pictographic signs u„d^.cters
are chiefly associated, whole groups of characters appear under the older linear guise, glyptic in-
Good examples of this are afforded by the grey steatite seal-stone from Knossos uences-
(P. 8), another of the same soft material from the province of Siteia (P. 7), and P. 11
from an uncertain Cretan site.

The sign-group on P. 11 is composed of three linear characters, the significance
of which might not be so clear if a comparative study did not bring out the fact that the
same group is of repeated occurrence in a more pictographic shape which brings out
the true origin of the signs.

The comparative groups given in Table XV (Fig. 104) sufficiently show that the first
sign, which resembles a Y, is in its origin a vegetable sign. No. 2, a rude gamma, turns-
out to be a human leg, and No. 3 a door or gate.1 It must be remembered that, of these
examples, the linear group (A) occurs on a steatite seal-stone of distinctly earlier fabric
(Class A of the present series). The other more pictorial groups {B and C) are taken

1 The leg and gate signs by themselves are also frequently coupled on the pictographic seals.