486 THE PALACE Ob' MINOS. 



Much .stud}^ and comparison will 1)o necessary for the eUicidation of 

 these materials, which it may be hoped will be largel}' supplemented 

 by the continued exploration of the palace. If, as may well l)e the 

 case, the languge in which they were written was some primitive form 

 of Greek we need not despair of the final decipherment of these Knos- 

 sian archives, and the bounds of history may eventually be so enlarged 

 as to take in the "heroic age" of Greece. In any case 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 are 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 My(;eniean 

 documents, it is impossible not to recognize that we have here a sys- 

 tem 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 exam- 

 ples of Phoenician writing. 



The signs alread}^ mentioned as engraved on the great gypsum blocKs 

 of the palace must be regarded as distinct from the script proper. 

 These blocks go back to the earliest period of the building, and the 

 symbols on them, which are of very limited selection, but of constant 

 recurrence, seem to have had a religious significance. The most con- 

 stantly recurring of these, indeed, is the labrys or double ax already 

 referred to — the special symbol of the Cretan Zeus, votive deposits of 

 which in bronze have been found in the cave sanctuaries of the god 

 on Mount Ida and Mount Dicta. The double ax is engraved on the 

 principal blocks, such as the corner stones and door jambs throughout 

 the building, and recurs as a sign of dedication on ever}^ side of every 

 block of a sacred pillar that forms the center of what seems to have 

 been the inmost shrine of an aniconic cult connected with this indigen- 

 ous divinity. 



The "house of Minos" thus turns out to be also the house of the 

 double ax^ — the labrys and its lord — in other words, it is the true Laby- 

 rinthos. The divine inspirer of Minos was not less the lord of the bull, 

 and it is certainly no accidental coincidence that huge figures of bulls in 

 painting and plaster occupied conspicuous positions within it. Na\', 

 more, on a small steatite relief, a couchant bull is seen above the door- 

 way of a building probably intended to represent the palace, and this 

 would connect it in the most direct way with the sacred annnal of the 

 Cretan Zeus. 



There can be little remaining dou])t that this vast edifice, which in a 

 broad historic sense we are justified in calling the "palace of Minos," 

 is one and the same as the traditional "labyrinth." A great part 



