een already described. The long inscription which covers both
of its faces is written in a form of hieroglyphics which, to some
extent, resembles the Minoan pictographic system, but is not the
same. The crested helmets which occur frequently as signs, the
round shields, the fashion of dress of both men and women, and the
style of architecture depicted in the hieroglyphic rendering of
a house or pagoda, are not Minoan; and, on the whole, the evidence
seems to point to the disc being the product of some allied culture,
perhaps Lycian, in which a language closely akin to that of Minoan
Crete was used. The inscription on the disc is carefully balanced
and arranged, and each side contains exactly the same number of
sign-groups, with one additional group on face A, which is separated
from the preceding part of the inscription by a dash. Certain sets
of sign-groups recur in the same order, as though they constituted
some kind of refrain. From these indications it has been suggested
that the whole inscription is a metrical composition, a short poem
or hymn--perhaps one leaf of an Anatolian Book of Psalms whose other
pages have perished. It is agreed that the language and religion of
the western coast of Asia Minor were closely allied to those of
Crete, and it is possible that when the Minoans developed their
own language on somewhat different lines from the mainlanders,
they maintained in parts of their religious service the old form
of the speech common to themselves and their Anatolian relatives,
as a kind of sacred language.[*]

[Footnote *: See Appendix, p. 264.]

Thus, it is abundantly evident that the civilization of Minoan
Crete, far from being dumb, had varied and perfectly adequate means
of expressing itself. The old Cretan tradition that the Phoenicians
did not invent the letters of the alphabet, but only changed those
already existing, is amply justified; for this seems to have been
precisely what they did. The Phoenician mind, if not original, was
at all events practical. The great stumbling-block in the way of
the ancient scripts was their complexity--a fault which the Minoan
users of the Linear Script, Class B, had evidently already begun to
recognize and endeavour to amend. What the Phoenicians did was to
carry the process of simplification farther still, and to appropriate
for their own use out of the elements already existing around them a
conveniently short and simple system of signs. The position which
the