TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION I. 915 
Dynasty, and to the earlier half of the third millennium before our era. It is 
not onJy that in primitive deposits, like that of Hagios Onuphrios, scarabs, acknow- 
ledged by competent archeologists to be of Twelfth Dynasty date, occurred in 
association with steatite seals presenting the Aigean spiral ornamentation, and 
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 Mycenzean times. Nor was this all, Through- 
out the whole of the island there came to light a great variety of primitive stone 
vases, mostly of steatite, a large proportion of which reproduced the characteristic 
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 Aigean 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 conse- 
quent spread of the returning spiral motive throughout the Aigean. 
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 AMgean population in 
pre-Mycenzean times. Especially are they valuable in supplying the antecedent 
stages to many characteristic elements of the succeeding Mycenzan 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 themselves had 
invented a system of writing to which the Pheenicians did not do more than add 
the finishing touches. Already, at the Oxford meeting 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 primitive seals 
belonging to the ‘Period of Amorgos.’ In the succeeding Mycenzan 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 my most recent 
investigations, I am now able to announce the discovery of an inscribed pre- 
historic 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 punctuations. It was obtained from the lowest level 
of a Mycenzan stratum, containing numerous votive objects, in the great cave of 
Mount Dikta, which, according to the Greek legend, was the birthplace of Zeus. 
This early Cretan script, which precedes by centuries the most ancient records 
of Phcenician writing, and supplies, at any rate, very close analogies to what may 
be supposed to have been the pictorial prototypes of several of the Phcenician 
letters, stands in a direct relation to the syllabic characters used at a later date by 
the Greeks of Cyprus. The great step in the history of writing implied by the 
evolution of symbols of phonetic value from primitive pictographs is thus shown 
to have effected itself on European soil. 
In many other ways the culture of Mycene—that extraordinary revelation from 
