heat to which they were exposed during the great
fire which destroyed the palace. 'Fire itself, so fatal to other
libraries, has thus insured the preservation of the archives of
Minoan Knossos.' Great care was plainly bestowed upon the storage
of the tablets. They were stored in chests and coffers of various
materials, and were evidently carefully separated according to
the different departments to which their contents referred. In
one deposit near the northern entrance, which was the 'Sea-Gate'
of the palace, the largest of the seatings which had secured the
cases in which the tablets were stored bore a representation of a
ship, possibly an indication of the fact that these tablets belonged
to the Minoan Board of Admiralty. One set of tablets had been stored
in a room which presents all the appearance of having been an office,
and the frequent occurrence in this deposit of the figures of a
horse's head, a chariot, and a cuirass, suggests that the store
belonged to the Minoan War Office, and refers to the equipment
of the Chariot Brigade of the Knossian army.

Further evidence of the business-like methods of the Minoan officials
was given by the fact that many of the seals belonging to the various
stores were countermarked on the face, and had their backs countersigned
and endorsed, evidently by examining officials, while they appear to
have been regularly filed and docketed for reference. Indeed, the
Minoan methods have already borne the test of having been accepted
as evidence in a modern court of law. 'In 1901,' says Dr. Evans,
'I discovered that certain tablets had been abstracted from the
excavations, and had shortly afterwards been purchased by the museum
at Athens. It further appeared that one of our workmen--a certain
Aristides--had left the excavation about the same time for Greece, and
had been seen in Athens offering "antikas" for sale under suspicious
circumstances. On examining the inscriptions on the stolen tablets
I observed a formula that showed that some or all of the pieces
belonged to a deposit found in Magazine XV. A reference to our
daybooks brought out the fact that the same Aristides had taken
part in the excavation of this particular magazine a little before
the date of his hasty departure. On his return to Crete, some months
later, he was accordingly arrested, and the evidence supplied by the
Minoan formula was accepted by the Candia Tribunal as a crowning
proof of his guilt. Aristides--"the U