147 



the Disk. Dr. Murray says of him fop. cit., p. 13): — "It is 

 noticeable that on our ivory the attendant wears a helmet 

 identical in shape with that worn by the enemies of the 

 Egyptians in the sea-fight figured by Rameses on the temple 

 at Medinet Abou." These are, of course, the Philistines and 

 the Zakkala, and the resemblance between the crested helmets 

 of these races and the crested helmet on the Disk has led other 

 scholars to believe that there is a Philistine element in the 

 inscription. With this, however, one cannot now agree. 

 Attention may also be directed to another relic of the Assyrian 

 period of the island, and this is the magnificent silver patera 

 from Amathus.( 10 ) Here are seen warriors with crested 

 helmets like those of the Disk, and round shields, attacking 

 a fortress, one or two of the defenders of which also wear the 

 same sort of helmet. ( n ) 



Now the head and shield signs are at the commencement 

 of 13 words in the inscription on the Disk, but, subtracting 

 instances where some of these words have been written 

 more than once, we get ten individual words prefixed 

 by the hieroglyphs in question. There is no doubt 

 that these two signs are ideographic determinatives, 

 and indicate that the characters following them in 

 the same word contain the proper name of a "Chief 

 of the Shield," i.e. (probably), a commander-in-chief of 

 an army, whose office was something like that held by the 

 "SHUPARSHAKTJ" (military commandant) appointed over 

 districts conquered by Assyria. In Assyrian cuneiform it was 

 the custom in the majority of instances to place a determin- 

 ative at the commencement of the word to which it referred, 

 and not at the end of it, as in the case of ancient Egyptian. 

 The scribes who made up the Phaestos Disk text seem then to 

 have followed the methods of their cuneiform-using colleagues, 

 and as a matter of fact it appears to me that the whole of the 

 pictorial text was made mainly under Assyrian direction, 

 although, as we have already seen, the words it contains are 

 evidently not, so far as most' of them are concerned, Semitic 

 ones. 



Sargon II., King of Assyria, received tribute in b.c. 715 

 from the seven Ionian Kings of Cyprus, who set up in their 

 island a figure of the Assyrian king as an emblem of their 

 vassalage; and his grandson, Esarhaddon, had homage paid 

 to him in b.c. 673 by ten Cypriote princes, nine Greeks, and 



(10) Figured in ''Cyprus," di Cesnola, London, 1877, pi. xix. 



• (11) See also the helmet worn by the sphinx on the ivory object 

 (No. 1126), illustrated in pi. ii., "Excavations in Cyprus." 



