The Origin of Greek Alphabet Discovered – 2

So long as the war-fleet of Minos was in being, Cnossos needed no fortifications.

Continuing The Origin of Greek Alphabet Discovered,
with a selection by James Baikie.

Previously in The Origin of Greek Alphabet Discovered.

So long as the war-fleet of Minos was in being, Cnossos needed no fortifications. No expedition of any size could force a landing on the island. If the crew of a chance pirate-galley, desperate with hunger, or tempted by reports of the wealth of the great palace, succeeded in eluding the vigilance of the Minoan cruisers and made a swift rush up from the coast, there was the bastion with its armed guard, enough to deal with the handful of men who could be detached for such a dare-devil enterprise. But in the fleet of Cnossos was her fate; and if once the fleet failed, she had no second line of defense on which to rely against any serious attack. There is every evidence that the fleet did fail at last. The manifest marks of a vast conflagration, perhaps repeated more than once during the long history of the palace, and the significant fact that vessels of metal are next to unknown upon the site, while of gold there is scarcely a trace, with the exception of scattered pieces of gold-foil, appear to indicate either that the Minoan Sovereigns failed to maintain the weapon which had made and guarded their empire, or that the Minoan sailors met at last with a stronger fleet or more skillful mariners. Sea-power was lost, and with it everything.

But the Cretan discovery which will doubtless prove in the end to be of greater importance than any other, though as yet the main part of its value is latent, was that of large numbers of clay tablets incised with inscriptions in the unknown script of the Minoans. By the end of March the finding of one tablet near the South Portico gave earnest of future discoveries, and before the season ended over a thousand had been collected from various deposits in the palace. Of these deposits, one contained tablets written in hieroglyphic; but the rest were in the linear script, “a highly developed form, with regular divisions between the words, and for elegance scarcely surpassed by any later form of writing.” The tablets vary in shape and size, some being flat, elongated bars from two to seven and a half inches in length, while others are squarer, ranging up to small octavo. Some of them, along with the linear writing, supply illustrations of the objects to which the inscriptions refer. There are human figures, chariots, and horses, cuirasses and axes, houses and barns, and ingots followed by a balance, and accompanied by numerals which probably indicate their value in Minoan talents. It looks as though these were documents referring to the royal arsenals and treasuries. “Other documents, in which neither ciphers nor pictorial illustrations are to be found, may appeal even more deeply to the imagination. The analogy of the more or less contemporary tablets, written in cuneiform script, found in the Palace of Tell-el-Amarna, might lead us to expect among them the letters from distant governors or diplomatic correspondence. It is probable that some of them are contracts or public acts, which may give some actual formulae of Minoan legislation. There is, indeed, an atmosphere of legal nicety, worthy of the House of Minos, in the way in which these records were secured. The knots of string which, according to the ancient fashion, stood in the place of locks for the coffers containing the tablets, were rendered inviolable by the attachment of clay seals, impressed with the finely engraved signets, the types of which represented a great variety of sub jects, such as ships, chariots, religious scenes, lions, bulls, and other animals. But — as if this precaution was not in itself considered sufficient — while the clay was still wet the face of the seal was countermarked by a controlling official, and the back countersigned and indorsed by an inscription in the same Mycenaean script as that inscribed on the tablets themselves.”

The tablets had been stored in coffers of wood, clay, or gypsum. The wooden coffers had perished in the great conflagration which destroyed the palace, and only their charred fragments remained; but the destroying fire had probably contributed to the preservation of the precious writings within, by baking more thoroughly the clay of which they were com posed. As yet, in spite of all efforts, it has not proved possible to decipher the inscriptions, for there has so far been no such good fortune as the discovery of a bilingual inscription to do for Minoan what the Rosetta Stone did for Egyptian hieroglyphics. But it is not beyond the bounds of probability that there may yet come to light some treaty between Crete and Egypt which may put the key into the eager searcher’s hands and enable us to read the original records of this long-forgotten kingdom.

Even as it is, the discovery of these tablets has altered the whole conception of the relative ages of the various early beginnings of writing in the eastern Mediterranean area. The Hellenic script is seen to have been in all likelihood no late -born child of the Phoenician, but to have had an ancestor of its own race; and the old Cretan tradition, on which Dr. Evans relied at the commencement of his work, has proved to be amply justified. “In any case,” said Dr. Evans, summing up his first year’s results, “the weighty question, which years before I had set myself to solve on Cretan soil, has found, so far, at least, an answer. That great early civilization was not dumb, and the written records of the Hellenic world were carried back some seven centuries beyond the date of the first- known historic writings. But what, perhaps, is even more remarkable than this, is that, when we examine in detail the linear script of these Mycenaean documents, it is impossible not to recognize that we have here a system of writing, syllabic and perhaps partly alphabetic, which stands on a distinctly higher level of development than the hieroglyphs of Egypt, or the cuneiform script of contemporary Syria and Babylonia. It is not till some five centuries later that we find the first dated examples of Phoenician writing.”

Continued.

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