arthur evans - the_palace_of_minos

654 THE PALACE OF MINOS, ETC.
superseded
by
Linear
Signs in
Crete.
Crete itself.
Neither have we here to deal, as might perhaps be suggested,
with a survival of the old hieroglyphic script of Crete in some religious
in common
connexion. As already observed, there is
hardly anything
between the two systems, and the most frequent signs on the Disk are conspicuous
by their absence among the Minoan hieroglyphs.
The indications as a whole must betaken to point to some neighbouring
area where a quasi-pictorial form of script was in use at a later period
than in Crete. That in the Hittite regions, at any rate, of Anatolia
a hieroglyphic survival did take place to a considerably later date than this
ft
FIG. 485.
/ m
FROM DISK.
SELECTED SIGNS
indica- is a well-ascertained fact. It is clear indeed that the signary of the Phaestos
connexion Disk is radically different from the Hittite system. But there are, as will
^e seen >
man
y reasons for ascribing
it to the intermediate region embracing
the Sou th-Western angle of Asia Minor. Within this area no inscriptions
of the Hittite class have been hitherto discovered, but a parallel hieroglyphic
system may well have flourished there.
In view of the non-existence of comparative materials from that area
the evidence is partly of a negative kind. The human figures, for instance,
reproduced among some selected signs in Fig. 485, 1 are as markedly non-
Minoan as- they are non-Hittite. The male figure a, performing the goosestep,
is of different build from the Minoan, and his belt and short tunic
1
From Dr. Stefani's drawings in Pernier, Disco di Phaestos.