MINOAN AND MYCENAEAN ELEMENT — EVANS. 619 



earlier date. If such a primitive occupation is not proved, it cer- 

 tainly will not be owing to want of ingenuity on the part of inter- 

 preters of the Minoan or connected scripts. The earliest of the Cre- 

 tan hieroglyphs were hailed as Greek on the banl^s of the Mulde. 

 Investigators of the Phaestos disk on both sides of the Atlantic have 

 found an Hellenic key, though the key proves not to be the same, and 

 as regards the linguistic forms unlocked it must be said that many of 

 them represent neither historic Greek, nor any antecedent stage of it 

 reconcilable with existing views as to the comparative grammar of 

 the Indo-European languages.^ 



The Phaestos disk, indeed, if my own conclusions be correct, 

 belongs rather to the eastern Aegean coast lands than to prehistoric 

 Crete. As to the Minoan script proper in its most advanced types — 

 the successive linear types A and B — my own chief endeavor at the 

 present moment is to set out the whole of the really vast material in 

 a clear and collective form. Even then it may well seem presump- 

 tuous to expect that anything more than the threshold of systematic 

 investigation will have been reached. Yet, if rumor speaks truly, 

 the stray specimens of the script that have as yet seen the light have 

 been amply sufficient to provide ingenious minds with a Greek — it is 

 even whispered, an Attic — interpretation. For that it is not even 

 necessary to wait for a complete signary of either of the scripts ! 



For myself I can not say that I am confident of any such solution. 

 To me at least the view that the Eteocretan population, who preserved 

 their own language down to the third century before our era, spoke 

 Greek in a remote prehistoric age is repugnant to the plainest dictates 

 of common sense. What certain traces we have of the early race 

 and language lead us in a quite diiferent direction. It is not easy to 

 recognize in this dark Mediterranean people, whose physical charac- 

 teristics can be now carried back at least to the beginning of the 

 second millennium before our era, a youthful member of the Aryan- 

 speaking family. It is impossible to ignore the evidence supplied 

 by a long series of local names which link on the original speech of 

 Crete and of a large part of mainland Greece to that of the primitive 

 Anatolian stock, of whom the Carians stand forth as, perhaps, the 

 purest representatives. The name of Knossos itself, for instance, is 

 distinctively Anatolian ; the earlier name of Lyttos — Karnessopolis — 

 contains the same element as Halikarnassos. But it is useless to 

 multiply examples, since the comparison has been well worked out 

 by Fick and Kretschmer and other comparative philologists. 



1 1 especially refei- to some of the strange linguistic freaks of Dr. Hempl. Prof. A. 

 Cuny has faithfully dealt with some of these in the Revue des fitudes Anciennes, T. XIV 

 (1912), pp. 95, 06. The more plausible attempt of Miss Stawell leaves me entirely 

 unconvincf'd. 



