beginnings and first bloom of the European civilization of to-day. For
our culture-ancestors are neither the Egyptians, nor the Assyrians, nor
the Hebrews, but the Hellenes, and they, the Aryan-Greeks, derived most
of their civilization from the pre-Hellenic people whom they found in
the land before them, the Pelasgi or "Mycenæan" Greeks, "Minoans," as we
now call them, the Keftiu of the Egyptians. These are the ancient Greeks
of the Heroic Age, to which the legends of the Hellenes refer; in their
day were fought the wars of Troy and of the Seven against Thebes, in
their day the tragedy of the Atridse was played out to its end, in their
day the wise Minos ruled Knossos and the _Ægean_. And of all the events
which are at the back of these legends we know nothing. The hiéroglyphed
tablets of the pre-Hellenic Greeks lie before us, but we cannot read
them; we can only see that the Minoan writing in many ways resembled
the Egyptian, thus again confirming our impression of the original early
connection of the two cultures.

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. Two Egyptian inscriptions have been found at
Knossos, but no bilingual one. A list of Keftian names is preserved in
the British Museum upon an Egyptian writing-board from Thebes with what
is perhaps a copy of a single Cretan hieroglyph, a vase; but again,
nothing bilingual. A list of "Keftian words" occurs at the head of a
papyrus, also in the British Museum, but they appear to be nonsense,
a mere imitation of the sounds of a strange tongue. Still we need
not despair of finding the much desired Cretan-Egyptian bilingual
inscription yet. Perhaps the double text of a treaty between Crete and