y came to occupy, after the Minoan empire of the sea had passed
away, as the great carriers and middlemen of the Mediterranean, gave
their system a spread and a utility possible to no other system
of writing; and so the Phoenician alphabet gradually came to take
its place as the basis of all subsequent scripts. Unquestionably
it was a great and important service which was thus rendered by
them; but, all the same, the beginnings of European writing must
be traced not to them, but to their predecessors the Minoans, and
the clay tablets of Knossos, Phaestos, and Hagia Triada are the
lineal ancestors of all the written literature of Europe.

In attempting to deal with the Minoan religion we are met by the
fact that it is as yet quite impossible to present any connected
view of the subject. As in the case of their literature we have
the actual records but cannot read them, so in the case of their
religion a considerable mass of facts is apparent, but we have no
means of co-ordinating them so as to arrive at any definite idea
of a religious system. Some of the ritual we can see, and even
understand something of the Divinity to whom it was addressed,
but the theology is lacking. Accordingly, nothing more can be done
than to present the fragmentary facts which are apparent.

The Minoans, it seems fairly clear, were never, like their successors
the Greeks, the possessors of a well-peopled Pantheon; nor was the
chief object of their adoration a male deity like the Greek Zeus.
There are, indeed, traces of a male divinity, who was adopted by
the Greeks when they obtained predominance in the island, as the
representative of their own supreme deity, and who became the Cretan
Zeus. But in Minoan times this being occupied a very subordinate
place, and undoubtedly the chief object of worship was a goddess--a
Nature Goddess, a Great Mother--[Greek: potnia thaerou], the Lady
of the Wild Creatures--who was the source of all life, higher and
lower, its guardian during the period of its earthly existence,
and its ruler in the underworld.

The functions of this great deity, it has been aptly pointed out,
are substantially those claimed for herself by Artemis in Browning's
poem, 'Artemis Prologizes':

'Through heaven I roll my lucid moon along;
I shed in hell o'er my pale people peace;
On earth, I, caring for the creatures, guard
Each pregnant yellow wolf and fox-bitch sleek,
And every feathered mother's callow brood,
A