UCTOUKR I, 1896J 



NATURE 



531 



chevron, ilie lozenge, and tlic sjiiral miyht have been seen 

 associated as in Ireland. It is on this line, r.-ither than on the 

 Danube and the Elbe, that we find in a continuous zone that 

 Cycloiiean tradition of domed chambers which is equally 

 illustiatcil at Mycena; and at New Grange. 



The-i- are not more than indications, but they gain additional 

 force from the converging evidence to which attention has already 

 been called of an ancient line of intercourse, mainly, we may 

 believe, connected with the tin trade lietween the East 

 Mediterranean basin and the Iberian West. A further corro- 

 boration of the view that an .-ligean impulse propagated itself as 

 far as our own islands from that side is ]ierhaps afforded by a 

 very remarkable find in a British barrow. 



I refer to the Bronze Age interment excavated by Canon 

 Greenwell on Kolkton Wold, in Yorkshire, in which, beside the 

 liodyof achild. were found three carved chalk objects resembling 

 round boxes with bossed lids. On one of these lids were 

 grouped together, with a lozenge-shaped space between them, 

 two jiartly spiraliform partly concentric circular ornaments, 

 which exhibit before our eyes the degeneration of two pairs of 

 returning spiral ornaments. Upon the sides of two of these 

 chalk caskets, associated with chevrons, saltires, and lozenges, 

 were rude indications of faces — eyes and nose of bird-like char- 

 acter — curiously recalling the early .tgean and Trojan types of 

 Dr. Schliemann. These, as M. Reinach has pointed out, also 

 find an almost exact parallel in the rude indications of the 

 human face seen on the sculptured menhirs of the Marne and 

 the Gard valleys. To this may be added the interesting com- 

 parisons su]i]iiied by certain clay vessels, of rounded form, 

 somew'hat resembling the chalk "caskets" discovered by MM. 

 Sirel in Spanish interments of the early metal age, in which 

 eyes and eyebrows of a primitive style are inserted, as on the 

 British relics, in the interspaces of linear ornamentation. The 

 third chalk disc exhibits, in place of the human face, a butterfly 

 with volute antennse, reminding us of the appearance of butter- 

 flies as a (lecorative motive on the gold roundels from the 

 shaft-graves of Mycenre, as also on early Mycentean gems of 

 steatite from Crete; in the latter case with the feelers curving 

 outwards in the same way. The stellate design with central 

 circles on the lid of one of the chalk caskets is itself not im- 

 possibly a distant degeneration of the star-flowers on the same 

 Mycena'an plates. Putting all these separate elements of re- 

 semblance together — the returning spiral and star, the rude face 

 and butterfly — the suggestion of .Egean reminiscence becomes 

 strong, but the other parallels lead us for the line of its 

 transmisMi)n towards the Iberian rather than the Scandinavian 

 route. ' 



So much, at least, results from these various comparisons 

 that, whether we find the spiral motive in the extreme West or 

 North of Europe, everything points to the .-Egean world as its 

 first European centre. But have we any right to regard it, even 

 there, as of indigenous evolution ? 



It had been long my own conviction that the j^igean spiral 

 system must itself be regarded as an offshoot of that of ancient 

 Egypt, which as a decorative motive on scarabs goes back, as 

 Prof. Petrie has shown, to the Fourth Dynasty. During the 

 time of the Twelfth Dynasty, which, on general grounds, may 

 be supposed roughly to correspond with the " Amorgan Period" 

 of ..-Egean culture, it attained its apogee. The spiral convolu- 

 tions now often cover the whole field of the scarab, and the 

 motive begins to spread to a class of black bucchero vases, the 

 chalk inlaying of whose ornaments suggests widespread European 

 analogies. But the important feature to observe is that here, as 

 in the case of the early .-Egean examples, the original material 

 on which the spiral ornament appears is stone, and that, so far 

 from being derived from an advanced type of metal work, it goes 

 back in Egypt to a time when metal was hardly known. 



The prevalence of the spiral ornamentation on stone work in 

 the .Egean islands and contemporary Egypt, was it merely to 

 be regarded as a coincidence ? To turn one's eye to the Nile 

 Valley, was it simply another instance of the "Mirage 

 OrieiitaU " f For my own part, I ventured to believe that, as 

 in the ca.se of Northern Europe, the spread of this system was 



1 A further piece of evidence pointing in this direction is supplied by one 

 of the chalk "caskets." On the upper disc of this, in the place corre- 

 sponding with the double-spirals on the other example, appears a degenera- 

 tion of the same tnolive in a more compressed form, resembling two sets of 

 concentric horseshoes united at their leases. This recurs at New Grange, 

 and single sets of concentric horseshoes, or scniicirctes, are found both 

 there and al Gavrinnis. The degeneration of tlie returning spiral motive 

 extends therefore to Brittany. 



NO. 1405. VOL. 54] 



connected with many collateral symptoms of commercial inter- 

 connection, so here, too, the appearance of this early /Egean 

 ornament would be found 'to lead to the demonstration of a 

 direct intercourse between the Greek islands and Egypt at 

 least a thousand years earlier than any that had hitherto been 

 allowed. 



One's thoughts iiaturally turned to Crete, the central island, 

 with one face on the Libyan Sea — the natural source and 

 seminary of /Egean culture — where fresh light was already being 

 thrown on the Mycentean civilisation by the researches of Prof. 

 Halbherr, but the earlier prehistoric remains of which were still 

 unexplored. Nor were these expectations unfounded. As the 

 result of three expeditions — undertaken in three successive years, 

 from the last of which I returned three months since — it has 

 been my fortune to collect a series of evidences of a very early 

 and intimate contact with Egypt, going back at least to the 

 Twelfth Dynasty, and to the earlier half of the third millennium 

 before our era. It is not only that in primitive deposits, like 

 that of Hagios Onuphrios, scarabs, acknowledged by cotnpetent 

 archaeologists to be of Twelfth Dynasty date, occurred in 

 association with steatite seals presenting the .Egean spiral 

 ornamentation, .tnd with early pottery answering to that of 

 Amorgos and the second city of Troy. This by itself might be 

 regarded by many as convincing. But — what from the point of 

 view of intercourse and chronology is even more important — in 

 the same deposit and elsewhere occurred early button-shaped 

 and triangular seals of steatite with undoubted indigenous copies 

 of Egyptian lotos designs characteristic of the same period, 

 while in the case of the three-sided bead-seals it was possible to 

 trace a regular evolution leading down to Mycensean times. 

 Nor was this all. Throughout the whole of the island there 

 came to light a great variety of priinitive stone vases, mostly of 

 steatite, a large proportion of which reproduced the charac- 

 teristic forms of Egyptian stone vases, in harder materials, going 

 far back into the Ancient Empire. The returning spiral motive 

 is also associated with these, as may be seen from a specimen 

 now in the collection of Dr. Naue, of Munich. 



A geological phenomenon which I was able to ascertain in 

 the course of my recent exploration of the eastern part of the 

 island goes far to explain the great importance which these 

 steatite or "soapstone" fabrics played in the primitive culture 

 of Crete and the .Egean islands. In the valley of the Sarakina 

 stream I came upon vast deposits of this material, the diffusion 

 of which could be further traced along a considerable tract of 

 the southern coast. The abundant presence of this attractive 

 and, at the same time, easily workable stone — then incomparably 

 more valuable, owing to the imperfection of the potter's art — 

 goes far to explain the extent to which these ancient Egyptian 

 forms were imitated, and the consequent spread of the returning 

 spiral motive throughout the .Egean. 



In the matter of the spiral motive, Crete may thus be said to 

 be the missing link between prehistoric Ireland and Scandinavia 

 and the Egypt of the Ancient Empire. But the early remains 

 of the island illustrate in many other ways the comparatively 

 high level of culture already reached by the ^Egean population 

 in prre-Mycenrean times. Especially are they valuable in supply- 

 ing the antecedent stages to many characteristic elements of the 

 succeeding Mycenfean civilisation. 



This ancestral relationship is nowhere more clearly traceable 

 than in a class of relics which bear out the ancient claim of the 

 islanders that they them.selves had invented a system of writing 

 to which the Phcenicians did not do more than add the finishing 

 touches. Already, at the Oxford ineeting of the Association, I 

 was able to call attention to the evidence of the existence of a 

 prehistoric Cretan script evolved by gradual simplification and 

 selection from an earlier picture writing. This earlier stage is, 

 roughly speaking, illustrated by a series of pritnitive seals 

 belonging to the " Period of Amorgos." In the succeeding 

 Mycenaean age the script is more conventionalised, often linear, 

 and though developments of the earlier forms of seals are 

 frequently found, they are usually of harder materials, and the 

 system is applied to other objects. As the result of rny most 

 recent investigations, I am now able to announce the discovery 

 of an inscribed prehistoric relic, which surpasses in interest and 

 importance all hitherto known objects of this class. It consists 

 of a fragment of what may be described as a steatite " Table of 

 Offerings," bearing part of what appears to be a dedication of 

 nine letters of probably syllabic values, answering to the same 

 early Cretan script that is seen on the seals, and with two 

 punctitations. It was obtained from the lowest level of a 



