'In any case,' said Dr.
Evans, summing up his first year's results, 'the weighty question,
which years before I had set myself to solve on Cretan soil, has
found, so far at least, an answer. That great early civilization
was not dumb, and the written records of the Hellenic world were
carried back some seven centuries beyond the date of the first-known
historic writings. But what, perhaps, is even more remarkable than
this, is that, when we examine in detail the linear script of these
Mycenaean documents, it is impossible not to recognize that we have
here a system of writing, syllabic and perhaps partly alphabetic,
which stands on a distinctly higher level of development than the
hieroglyphs of Egypt, or the cuneiform script of contemporary Syria
and Babylonia. It is not till some five centuries later that we
find the first dated examples of Phoenician writing.'[*]
[Footnote *: _Monthly Review_, March, 1901, p. 130.]
Among the other finds of this wonderful season's work were several
stone vases, of masterly workmanship, in marble, alabaster, and
steatite, a few vases in pottery of the stirrup type (a type common
on other Mycenaean sites, but noticeably rare at Knossos, probably
because in the great palace the bulk of such vases were of metal,
and were carried off by plunderers in the sack), and a noble head of
a lioness, with eyes and nostrils inlaid, which had evidently once
formed part of a fountain.
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