Fig. 20.
Fig. 21.
That many of these signs are linearistic degenerations of animal and other figures is clear, and such figures may be reasonably considered to have an ideographic sense. But from this to investing the marks on a primitive whorl or pot with a definite phonetic value, and proceeding to read them off by the aid of the Cypriote syllabary of the Greek language as it existed some two thousand years later, can only be described as a far cry. Linearized signs of altogether alphabetic appearance belong, as already shown, to the very beginnings of human culture. In the case of the whorls, moreover, many of the linear figures are really repetitions of similar marks due to the decay of a border pattern—a phenomenon already paralleled by some of the engraved groups of the Reindeer Period. A recurring decorative fragment of this kind somewhat resembles, according to the progressive stages of its decadence, the Cypriote go, ti, or re—a circumstance productive of readings by eminent scholars[40] containing vain repetitions of go go, ti ti, and re re.
If we turn to Crete, the source of the developed pre-Phoenician scripts of Greece and the Aegean world, we find evidence of the same primitive stratum of linearized pictography. But the true hieroglyphic script, in which the phonetic element is apparently already present, in addition to the ideographic, displays other features which lie beyond the scope of our present theme. In the advanced linear scripts which grow out of this, and which certainly have a largely phonetic basis, we mark a regularity of arrangement and a definite setting forth of word-groups altogether different from the phenomena presented by the elemental figures of primitive pictography. The Phoenician and later Greek alphabet carries us a step further.
But the conventionalized pictography of Crete, if it does not give us the actual source of the later Phoenician letters, at least supplies the best illustration of the elements out of which it was evolved. And it will be seen, from what has been already said, that the more primitive field of pictography, out of which this conventionalized Cretan system arose, is itself only a branch of a widely diffused European family of picture-writing, of which the records can be traced from Lapland to the Straits of Gibraltar, and from the Atlantic to the Aegean, and which finds again its continuation on the African and the Asiatic side.
There seems to be a kind of hazy notion that though an elaborate system of pictography may have been current among the American Indians, for example, the alphabet, or for that matter the Cretan script, came to Greece as a kind of gift of the gods, and was taken over by a population that had no graphic means of communication. It is true that the earlier records of such, owing to their having been largely on perishable materials, such as bark or hides, may in many cases be irrecoverable. But we may be sure that they existed throughout the Aegean lands, as elsewhere. Nay, it was because they not only existed, but had already reached a comparatively advanced stage, that the acceptation of such a highly developed system of writing as that of the Phoenician alphabet was rendered possible. Even the forms of the letters must themselves have been largely familiar, since, as we have seen, the use of the linearized signs of the purest alphabetiform character goes back to what in many respects must be regarded as another world, and to a time, it may be, when articulate language was itself but imperfectly developed.