INIav 2, 1 901] 



NATrRI' 



of the work under review) ; there are hundreds of other 

 instances. The bull was the beast of Zeus : the idea of 

 a Phoenician origin of the Minotaur is just so much 

 rubbish : he is a purely Mycen:ean conception. And his 

 master, Minos? What would Mr. Grote have said had 

 he been told that in 1901 the name of Minos would pass 



1m.-,. 2. -The Fiftli Magazine, showing Great /'/.'/(,.; and Receptacle 



from the realms of pure myth into those of historical 

 probability ? Yet we have what look very much like the 

 remains of a great Cretan power dating long before the 

 Return of the Herakleids, in fact the power and king- 

 dom ol Minos. The evidence of Greek legend can no 

 longer be scoffed at, and the tradition of the Minoan 

 thalassocracy may yet be shown to contain a substratum 

 of historical fact. Those Keftiu went far afield : they 

 reached Egypt. Sicily and Kamikos are no farther. 



The records of Knussos have much to tell us, but as 

 yet they are dumb. There they lie before us, those 

 queer characters incised on tablets of sun-baked clay, but 

 we cannot read them yet. How long we shall continue 

 in this state of tantalising ignorance it is impossible to 

 tell. The lamentable failure to read the so-called 

 " Hittite" script of Eastern Asia Minor is no good augury. 

 This discovery of in- 

 scribed tablets is the 

 most important in the 

 field of early Greek anti- 

 quities since the excava- 

 tion of the graves at 

 Mycen.e. The tablets, 

 good illustrations of which 

 are given by Mr. Evans, 

 were found in a number 

 of deposits or "hoards" 

 the palace, mostly 



fast gaining ground, that Egypt e-xercised no little in- 

 fluence upon the development of Mycen;ean culture. 

 • In the other hand, the use of clay for the tablets is a 

 sure sign of the influence of the rival civilisation of 

 Babylonia. ^lany of the tablets evidently contain simply 

 lists of ships, chariots, horses, swine, &c. ; so much we 

 can guess from the pic- 

 tures. The numerical sys- 

 tem is evident ; further than 

 this we cannot go. It had 

 long seemed curious that 

 the highly developed civili- 

 sation of Mycena'an days 

 should have been ignorant 

 of the art of writing ; but 

 we had no conclusive proof 

 of Mycenrean writing before 

 Mr. Evans's epoch-making 

 discovery. Now here are 

 the records of the Myce- 

 na;ans before our eyes ; 

 <r»}/iaTaXvyp(i. indeed ! They 

 will not want for energetic 

 " Bearbeitung," and the 

 Clarendon Press is already 

 preparing a fount of Myce- 

 naean type I But the omens 

 are bad. 



We have remarked that 

 Mr. Evans has shown that 

 the Keftiu who brought 

 gifts to the court of Thoth- 

 mes III. of Egypt, c. 1550 

 li.C, were Mycenajan Cre- 

 tans. This conclusion is a 

 legitimate one. Some of 

 the finest known exainples 

 of Mycenrean fresco-paint- 

 ing have been found in 

 the Knossian palace, and among them are representa- 

 tions of processions of men bearing vases, &c., who in 

 dress are absolutely identical, on the one hand, with the 

 bull-catchers of the \'aphio cups, on the other with the 

 Ke/liii who are depicted on the walls of Rekhmaras 

 tomb at Thebes, in Egypt. No doubt of the identity is 

 possible ; the further presumption that the pictures of 

 Rekhmara's tomb are roughly contemporaneous with the 

 frescoes of Knossos is backed up by the cumulative 

 force of all the rest of the chronological e\idence, besides 

 being inherently probable from the almost exact 

 similarity of costume, &c. The date of c. 1550 B.C. for 

 the la/er portions of the Mycenaean palace at Knossos is 

 thus clearly indicated. 



These frescoes give us an inkling of the racial type of 

 the Mycen:T?ans. They are not fair-haired Aryans 



r/m 1 



-Linear Tablet referring to Chariot and Horses and, perhaps, Cuir.ass. (Size of original.) 



packed away in sealed boxes placed in large rvidni or handle- 

 less vases I a specimen of the kind, brought from Rhodes, 

 is in the First \'ase Room of the British Museum), 

 which were stored in special chambers. The writing is 

 of two kinds, hieroglyphic (" pictographic") and linear: 

 in both remarkable resemblances to Egyptian characters 

 are noticeable, and give further proof of the idea, now 



X(>. 1644, \'01,. 64 ] 



at all. They are brunett, black-haired, un-Aryan 

 people like the modern Italians, Greeks and Anato- 

 lians ; they belong, in effect, to the " Stirpe Mediter- 

 ranea " of Sergi, the race which we may, if we like, call 

 Pelasgian, which preceded the Aryans in Greece as 

 well as in Asia Minor, and of whose peculiar language- 

 type Karian and Lycian give us a good idea. The Aryan 



