One’s range of activity would increase as time went on, and it might conceivably be necessary to deliver a message to a man over on the other side of the valley in circumstances where one could not take it oneself. Such a contingency would produce some form of written message, for the message might be private or unsuitable for oral transmission by a third party. To give a concrete example from later times: Proitus wanted to kill Bellerophon, but did not want to do it himself; he therefore sent the doomed man to the King of Lycia “with letters of introduction written on a folded tablet, containing much ill against the bearer ... that he might be slain” (Homer, “Iliad,” vi. 169). Not all people are original enough to transmit such a communication orally by the bearer.
Fifty, even forty, years ago it was the general doctrine of Greek scholars that the Homeric poems were never written down till long after they were composed, perhaps even, so some thought, not until 560 B.C. Till then, we used to be taught, they were preserved wholly by memory and by oral transmission. But on the strength of the above passage from Homer—the only passage in either “Iliad” or “Odyssey” where writing is mentioned—Andrew Lang in 1883 argued that the art of writing must have been known to the early Greeks. “It is almost incredible,” he said, “that the quick-witted Greeks should have neglected an art which met them everywhere in Egypt and Asia.” He argued better than he knew. Not only was the art of writing known to the early Greeks, but it was known to their forerunners a few thousand years earlier, forerunners whose very existence was not suspected when Andrew Lang wrote. Curiously there had been found no trace of writing in the Mycenæan remains, although this fact has since been shown to be due to mere chance.
In 1893 Sir (then Mr.) Arthur Evans caused general astonishment by communicating to the Hellenic Society his discovery of the fact that certain seal stones which he had found in Greece, and which had been assumed to be Peloponnesian, were, in fact, Cretan. This startling revelation was clinched during the years that followed by the discovery of further specimens of Cretan writing. Excavation in Crete was started in 1900, and the first year’s work yielded up hundreds of clay tablets inscribed with Cretan writing. Was Homer writing fairy stories when he made Proitus send his doomed Bellerophon to Lycia with his “folded tablet”? Or did he know that the Lycians were colonists from Crete?
A tentative sketch of the successive phases through which the art of writing passed may be made, even if it largely depends upon unconfirmed surmise. The temptation to fill in the gaps by what seems reasonable conjecture is hard to resist.
Minoan writing must have started, quite naturally, with simple pictographs, such as have, in fact, been found—simple pictures of a man, a leg, a ship, representing a definite thing that it was desired to indicate. They are called “ideographs” because they signify a single idea. They next developed into “hieroglyphs,” that is, pictures which had acquired by association a certain use among the people who employed them, but whose original meaning has been lost, and can now only be inferred. In the parallel case of Egyptian hieroglyphics, guessing at such meanings has been shown to be dangerous work, for in many cases the established interpretation is far other than what one might have supposed.
The first pictographs were evolved in the Early Minoan period (c. 2800-2600 B.C.), and are found on seal stones. It may be fairly assumed, therefore, that in Crete the first method of writing down ideas was by seal impressions. By the Middle Minoan period the seal stones are elongated, and contain a succession of designs, by which a connected chain of ideas could be reproduced. The lines of pictures are sometimes read from left to right, sometimes from right to left, a feature in which, as in others, they resemble the Hittite system of writing. In all cases the document is read in the direction in which the figures it contains are facing. Scripta Minoa (p. 203) gives a typical example of this species: namely, a picture of a ship with two crescent moons, of which the probable meaning was a voyage of two months’ duration.
The next step in the evolution of writing came, no doubt, when phonetic values were assigned to the pictures; that is, when the sound made in pronouncing the name of a given thing or person or action became associated with the conventional ideograph which represented that thing or person or action. When that happened, the same ideograph began to be used in writing out other, more complex, words in which the same sound occurred, although in meaning there was no connection with the original pictograph. To take a hypothetical example. Suppose we were in that stage of evolution to-day. We may have formed the habit of denoting an axe by a simple picture of that instrument; thereafter the sign of an axe would have become a symbol for spelling the same sound whenever it appeared in any other word. In spelling the word “accident,” for instance, we should start with the picture of an axe. This sort of thing seems to us mere “punning,” but it would cause no more difficulty or hesitation to the primitive writer than it would have, say, to Mr. Weller, senior, to whom the relation of the written to the spoken word and of words to things was still mysterious. Once begun, the method would be eagerly applied to fresh words.
The first attempt at “syllabics,” or the writing out of a word by separate symbols for its separate syllables, was made more intelligible by the use of “determinatives.” By “determinative” is meant a pictographic representation of the idea denoted by the whole word. These we find appended to the spelling of a word in order to give the reader at least some inkling as to whether the word denoted mineral, animal or vegetable. A man’s name, for instance, would be followed by a picture of a man.
The physical strain involved in drawing pictures every time one wanted to write down a word or two would obviously soon become intolerable. It is not therefore to be wondered at that, by the time of the Middle Minoan III period, the hieroglyphics have been simplified into conventional signs which are easier to make. Herein is the germ of what we call “linear” script, that is, of a system of writing based on a set of regular forms, such as our own alphabet. By the Late Minoan I period there was a full linear script in use throughout Crete, and it was extended to Melos and Thera. Sir Arthur Evans has called this script “Class A” to distinguish it from a parallel form of it which was introduced in the next period (Late Minoan II), and which he calls “Class B.” The latter is not a different script, but merely a variation introduced, it is supposed, by a new dynasty at Knossos. Most of the Knossian tablets that have come down to us belong to the “Palace period,” and are written in the Class B style.
It was the usual practice to write the inscriptions with a stilus, that is a pointed rod of metal, on a clay tablet, and this is the form of most of the inscriptions that have been preserved. It is possible that wooden tablets covered with a layer of wax were also used; but even if they were, none of them, of course, could have survived the burning of the palaces. More interesting still is the fact that pen and ink must have been used even in those remote times. This fact is established by the discovery of two cups (Middle Minoan III) which are inscribed in ink. There can be little doubt, therefore, that long documents and any literature there happened to be were written in ink on papyrus. It is probable that we shall have to make up our minds to the complete loss of all such literature, for Cretan soil lacks the dryness of the Egyptian. If our worst fears prove true, we may experience the final anti-climax of the discovery that the clay tablets, when read, will contain nothing after all but lists and bills.