DISCO VKRY 



commonplace event that was to take place at the 

 same time, and by hanging the picture up in an 

 obvious spot. 



One's range of activity would increase as time went 

 .in, and it might conceivably be necessary to deliver 

 a message to a man over on the other side of the 

 valley in circumstances where one could not take it 

 oneself. Such a contingency would produce some 

 form of written message, for the message might hv 

 private or unsuitable for oral transmission by a third 

 party. T« give a concrete example from later times ' : 

 Proitus wanted to kill Bellerophon. but did not want 

 to do it himself ; he therefore sent the doomed man 

 to the King of Lycia "with letters of introduction 

 written on a folded tablet, containing much ill agaiii>t 

 the bearer . . . that he might be slain." It would ha\i 

 been tactless to transmit such a communication orally 

 by the bearer. 



Fifty, even forty, years ago it was the general 

 doctrine of Greek scholars that the Homeric poems 

 were never written down till long after they were 

 composed, perhaps even, so some thought, not until 

 560 B.C. Till then, we used to be taught, they were 

 preserved wholly by memory and by oral transmission. 

 But on the strength of the above passage from Homer 

 —the only passage in either Iliad or Odvssey where 

 writing is mentioned — Andrew Lang in 1883 argued 

 that the art of writing must have been known to the 

 early Greeks. " It is almost incredible." he said, 

 " that the quick-witted Greeks should have neglected 

 an art which met them everywhere in Egj-pt and Asia. " 

 He argued better than he knew. Not only was 

 the art of writing known to the early Greeks, but it 

 was known to their forerunners a few thousand years 

 earlier, forerunners whose ver\' existence was not 

 suspected when Andrew Lang wrote. Curiously there 

 had been found no trace of writing in the Mycenaean 

 remains, although this fact has since been shown to 

 be due to mere chance. 



In 1893 Sir (then Mr.) Arthur Evans caused general 

 astonishment by communicating to the Hellenic 

 Society his discover}' of the fact that certain seal 

 stones which he had found in Greece, and which had 

 been assumed to be Peloponnesian, were in fact 

 Cretan. This startling revelation was clinched during 

 the years that followed by the discovery of further 

 specimens of Cretan writing. Excavation in Crete 

 was started in 1900, and the first j^ears work yielded 

 up hundreds of clay tablets inscribed with Cretan 

 writing. Was Homer writing fairy stories when he 

 made Proitus send his doomed Bellerophon to Lycia 

 with his " folded tablet " ? Or did he know that the 

 Lycians were colonists from Crete? 



A tentative sketch of the successive phases through 



1 Homer, Iliad, vi. 169. 



which the art of writing passed may be made, even if 

 it largely depends upon unconfirmed surmise. The 

 temptation to fill in the gaps by what seems reason- 

 able conjecture is hard to resist. 



Minoan writing must have started, quite naturally 



(UlscovtKV, .^ugu^l l-j2->, p. iVJl ■ " '" ■' "^""» ^umdur ;o( Ur- r.il.icc at 

 Knossos] was found the fresco painting of the cupbearer, an astonishing 

 work of art. It tepresenU a >Unoan youth of still but not unpleasing 

 dignity, carr>-ing a gold and silver vase before him. The fresco had fallen 

 into the corridor when the connecting wall bro'ie down." 



with simple pictographs, such as have, in fact, been 

 found — simple pictures of a man, a leg, a ship, repre- 

 senting a definite thing that it was desired to indicate. 

 They are called " ideographs " because they signify 



