opying should be necessary in such a matter.
The clay tablets engraved with hieroglyphic and linear script suggest
at once the corresponding and universal use of the clay tablet for
the cuneiform script of Babylonia; and that is practically all
that can be said of any connection between the cultures of Crete
and Mesopotamia.

The case is quite different, however, when we come to the relations
between Crete and the great civilization of the Nile Valley. In
this case there is, if not abundance, at all events a sufficiency
of evidence as to an intercourse which extended through practically
the whole duration of the Minoan Empire. For the Early Dynastic
period of Egyptian history the evidence is somewhat slight, and
the interpretation of it not always certain. When we come to the
Middle Kingdom of Egypt--a period contemporaneous with Middle Minoan
II. and III.--it becomes both more abundant and more unquestionable
in meaning; while with the New Empire (Eighteenth Dynasty) and Late
Minoan II. we reach absolutely firm ground, the correspondence of
art motives, and the actual proofs of intercourse, especially on
the Egyptian side, being indisputable. Our object, then, in this
chapter is to exhibit the evidence of the relationship between
Crete and Egypt, and to inquire to what conclusion it leads us
concerning the dates of the various periods of Minoan history.

For the earliest period we are left with somewhat scanty evidence.
Professor Petrie has found in some of the First Dynasty graves at
Abydos vases of black hand-burnished ware, which are very closely
allied, both inform and colour, to the primitive 'bucchero' discovered
immediately above the Neolithic deposit in the West Court at Knossos;
and he has suggested that, as the pottery is not Egyptian in style,
it may have been imported from Crete. On various sites in the palace
at Knossos there have been found stone vessels of diorite, syenite,
and liparite, exquisitely wrought. Now, such work is eminently
characteristic of the Early Egyptian Dynastic period, the artists
of that time taking a pride in turning out bowls of these intensely
hard stones, wrought sometimes to such a degree of fineness as to
be translucent. The chances are against these bowls having been
imported in later days, as the taste for them gradually died out
in Egypt, and 'no ancient nation had antiquarian tastes till the
time of the Saites in Egypt and of the Romans still later.' The
stone vessels di