Up to the present the old pictography of the lands between the Adriatic and the Black Sea and the lower Danubian basin is best illustrated by the linear incised figures found on the primitive pottery of that region. The best collection of such signs is due to the researches of Fräulein Torma, at Broos, in Transylvania. In view of the ethnic and archaeological connexions which are shown to have existed between the lower Danubian regions and the western part of Asia, it is specially interesting to note the analogies that these Transylvanian graffiti present with those noted by Schliemann on the whorls and pottery of Hissarlik (Fig. 21).[39] Both groups, moreover, belong approximately to the same epoch, marked by the transition from the Neolithic to the Early Metal Age. [Illustration: FIG. 20.] [Illustration: FIG. 21.] That many of these signs are linearistic degenerations of animal and other figures is clear, and such figures may be reasonably considered to have an ideographic sense. But from this to investing the marks on a primitive whorl or pot with a definite phonetic value, and proceeding to read them off by the aid of the Cypriote syllabary of the Greek language as it existed some two thousand years later, can only be described as a far cry. Linearized signs of altogether alphabetic appearance belong, as already shown, to the very beginnings of human culture. In the case of the whorls, moreover, many of the linear figures are really repetitions of similar marks due to the decay of a border pattern--a phenomenon already paralleled by some of the engraved groups of the Reindeer Period. A recurring decorative fragment of this kind somewhat resembles, according to the progressive stages of its decadence, the Cypriote _go_, _ti_, or _re_--a circumstance productive of readings by eminent scholars[40] containing vain repetitions of _go go_, _ti ti_, and _re re_. If we turn to Crete, the source of the developed pre-Phoenician scripts of Greece and the Aegean world, we find evidence of the same primitive stratum of linearized pictography. But the true hieroglyphic script, in which the phonetic element is apparently already present, in addition to the ideographic, displays other features which lie beyond the scope of our present theme. In the advanced linear scripts which grow out of this, and which certainly have a largely phonetic basis, we mark a regularity of arrangement and a definite setting forth of word-groups altogether different from the phenomena presented by the elemental figures of primitive pictography. The Phoenician and later Greek alphabet carries us a step further.