The Phoenician mind, if not original, was
at all events practical. The great stumbling-block in the way of
the ancient scripts was their complexity--a fault which the Minoan
users of the Linear Script, Class B, had evidently already begun to
recognize and endeavour to amend. What the Phoenicians did was to
carry the process of simplification farther still, and to appropriate
for their own use out of the elements already existing around them a
conveniently short and simple system of signs. The position which
they 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.
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