Unfortunately, such materials, on which, in all probability, the
real literary documents of the Minoans, if there were any such
documents, would be written, can scarcely have survived the fire
which destroyed the palace, or, if by any chance they escaped that,
the subsequent action of the climate; so that whatever genuinely
literary fragments may yet come to light must be looked for on the
larger tablets, and at the best can scarcely be more than brief
extracts. We cannot expect from Crete a wealth of papyri such as
Egypt has preserved for the archaeologist.
Into quite a different category from any of the ordinary Minoan
tablets comes the disc found at Phaestos in 1908. Its general character
has been 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.
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