e description of the materials
and their comparison with those furnished by other scripts, a task
which has so far been accomplished by Dr. Evans in the first volume
of his 'Scripta Minoa.' An immense amount of material has been
accumulated, and has been separated into various classes, which
have been shown to be characteristic of different periods of Minoan
history. It is possible to arrive at a general understanding of
the matters to which certain items of the material refer, but the
actual reading of the inscribed tablets has as yet proved to be
impossible. To all appearance, moreover, a considerable proportion
of the material appears to be not literary, in any true sense,
but to consist of inventories and accounts, perhaps also of legal
documents and other such records of purely business and practical
interest. Even so it would be a matter of no small importance could
it be found possible to decipher the records, let us say, of the
War Office or Admiralty of Knossos, or to survey the details of
royal house-keeping in those far-off days; and it may still be
hoped that, when the ardently desired bilingual inscription at
last turns up and makes decipherment possible, we may find that
documents of more genuinely literary interest are not altogether
lacking. One thing at least is abundantly clear--that, as Dr. Evans
put it in the summary of his first year's results, 'that great
early civilization was not dumb,' but, on the contrary, had means
of expression amply adequate to its needs.

In 1894 M. Perrot wrote:[*] 'As at present advised, we can continue
to affirm that for the whole of this period, nowhere, neither in
the Peloponnese nor in Greece proper, no more on the buildings
than on the thousand and one objects of luxury or domestic use
that have come out of the tombs, has there anything been discovered
which resembled any kind of writing.' The statement was perfectly
true to the facts as then known; but it was obviously unthinkable
that, while the Egyptians and Babylonians had their fully developed
scripts, and while ruder races, such as the Hittites, had their
systems of writing, the men who built the splendid walls and palaces
of Tiryns and Mycenae, and wrought the diadems and decorations of the
Shaft-Graves, should have been so far back in one of the chiefest
essentials of human progress as to be unable to communicate with one
another by means of writing. We have already seen how the discoveries
of the first yea