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But in the latest phases of the Third Middle Minoan period there begins to appear, at Knossos and elsewhere, a series of inscriptions in a very different style. The characters are no longer hieroglyphic, but have become definitely linear, and are arranged very much as in ordinary writing.
This would place Early Minoan I., which must be equated with the First Dynasty, about 3400 B.C. Practically, all that can be said with a moderate amount of certainty is that the earliest civilization of Crete, like that of Egypt, was in existence at a period not much later than 3500 B.C., while it is not impossible that it may be 1,500 years older.
Relief work in stucco was represented by fragments of a life-sized figure, since pieced together by M. Gilliéron, which must have been that of some Minoan King. The head wears a fleur-de-lys crown and peacock plumes, and round the neck of the finely modelled torso there runs a collar of fleur-de-lys ornament.
In view of this connection, and the known close relations between Crete and Egypt, from the end of the XIIth Dynasty to the end of the XVIIIth, we might have hoped to recover at Knossos a bilingual inscription in Cretan and Egyptian hieroglyphs which would give us the key to the Minoan script and tell us what we so dearly wish to know. But this hope has not yet been realized.
Patterns very various but not naturalistic except in rare instances. Late Minoan. circa. 1500 B.C. Return to use of light ground. Brown lustrous paint, fine surface to clay. White and orange disappear. Decoration stiffer and more conventional. NEOLITHIC. Nothing known. Contemporary with Early Minoan. Pottery with geometric patterns normally dark on light buff or reddish coarse clay.
The beginning of the use of this system may have been in the early part of the fifteenth century B.C., and it was in full service at the great catastrophe of Knossos, at the end of the fifteenth or beginning of the fourteenth century B.C. Its use still continued after the fall of the Minoan power, tablets inscribed with this form of writing being found in the Late Minoan III. House of the Fetish Shrine at Knossos.
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.
Besides the trade in oil, it would seem that there must have been a trade in the purple of the murex, and no doubt the Keftiu mariners found a ready market for this much-prized product long before the Phnicians dreamed of Tyrian purple. Minoan pottery was manifestly also an article of export a fragile cargo for those days.
Evans in the first volume of his 'Scripta Minoa. An immense amount of material has been accumulated, and has been separated into various classes, which have been shown to be characteristic of different periods of Minoan history.
Three of these show boxers in all attitudes of the prize-ring striking, guarding, falling; while the second zone from the top exhibits one of the bull-grappling scenes so common in Minoan art, with two charging bulls, one of them tossing on his horns a gymnast who appears to have missed his leap and paid the penalty.
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