TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION H. 897 



2. The Stone Age in Tasmania as related to the History of Civilisation 



By E. B. Tylor, F.R.S. 



Tliis paper, •with special reference to the previous one, discussed the Paleolithic, 

 or unground Stone Age in Tasmania, which lasted till superseded by the English 

 colonisation early in this century, passing directly into the Iron Age without the 

 intervention of a Neolithic, or ground Stone Age. 



Report on Mental and Physical Deviations of Children in Schools, 

 See Reports, p, 461, 



4. Report on the Silchester Excavation. — See Reports, p. 466. 



5. Writing in Prehistoric Greece. By ARTHUR J. EvANS, M.A., F.S.A 



(1) Clay Documents with Hieroglyphic or Conventionalised Pictographic 

 Script from the Palace of Knossos. 



The discovery originally announced by the author in 1894, in this Section * of 

 the existence in prehistoric Crete of a system of conventionalised pictographic or 

 hieroglyphic writing had received an extraordinary corroboration and supplement 

 from his recent excavations in the Mycenaean Palace of Knossos. The first indica- 

 tions had been supplied by groups of signs engraved on early seal-stones, and by its 

 nature the evidence was limited. But in the great prehistoric building now par- 

 tially explored at Knossos, the latest elements of which can hardly be brought 

 down later than the thirteenth century B.C., there came to light a series of 

 deposits of clay archives inscribed both with hieroglyphic and a new system of 

 linear writing. 



Those of the hieroglyphic class, though apparently contemporary with the 

 other, were less numerous and were found in a separate magazine. They were in 

 the form of square and three-sided bars, perforated at the end, clay 'labels ' also 

 perforated, in shape like bivalve shells, and sealings of clay which also presented 

 impressions of signets with characters of the same conventionalised pictographic 

 class. The graffito characters of the clay bars, &c., gave more linearised versions 

 of the fuller representations of the engraved seals, and thus illustrated a step in the 

 formation of letters. The tablets showed various new forms of hieroglyphs not as 

 yet found on the signets, raising the Cretan series to over a hundred. The picto- 

 graphic signs might be said to form an illustrated history of Cretan culture in 

 Mycensean times. Among new characters might be mentioned an eight-stringed 

 lyre, carpenter's tools such as a kind of plane and perhaps a level, dogs' heads 

 bees, a glove-like object perhaps not unconnected witli bee-keeping, and appa- 

 rently olive sprays. The obviously ' ideographic ' or ' determinative ' character of 

 some of the hieroglyphs gives a clue to the meaning of many of the tablets. Ships, 

 ploughs and ox-heads, vessels filled with grain, and the Egyptian palace sign 

 speak for themselves. A boustrophedon arrangement of the characters is often 

 traceable. Many of these clay records are accounts, as is shown by the presence 

 of various numeral signs, the ciphers never exceeding eight in a group. But the 

 form of numeration still presents points of obscurity. 



The hieroglyphic script itself shows a certain parallelism with the'Hittite' 

 inscriptions of Anatolia and Northern Syria. Its beginnings can, however, be 

 traced very far back on Cretan soil, and it unquestionably represents the writing 

 of the indigenous Cretan stock, the Eteocretans of the ' Odyssey.' 



' Report Brit. Assoc. (Oxford), 1894, p. 776. 

 1900. 3 M 



