How it was brought to Krete we do not know. It may have passed over from the shores of Canaan; it may have come from Cyprus or Asia Minor. A seal-cylinder, which I have lately published, and which was found in the early copper-age cemetery of Agia Paraskevi in Cyprus, shows that the so-called Cypriote syllabary was already in use in the island at a remote date,[152] and this syllabary is closely connected with the linear characters of Krete. Inscriptions in the same form of script have been found on the site of Troy, and the pre-Israelitish pottery of Southern Palestine is marked with signs which seem to be derived from it. So, too, is certain Egyptian pottery of the age of the Eighteenth dynasty, and even of the age of the Twelfth.[153] It is possible that Krete was the birthplace of the picture writing which developed into the linear script of Knossos and the Cypriote syllabary; it is possible that it was rather Cyprus. I do not think, as I once did, that it comes from Asia Minor, for Asia Minor had its own pictographic system, which we see represented in the Hittite inscriptions, and an increased knowledge of this system tends to dissociate it from the pictographs and syllabaries of Krete and Cyprus. Wherever it arose, however, it was associated with the Babylonian writing material and the Babylonian seal-cylinder. So far as our present knowledge goes, Cyprus is more likely than any other part of the world to have been the meeting-point of Babylonian culture and the nascent civilization of the West. The numerous seal-cylinders which characterize the early copper age of the island are native imitations of Babylonian seal-cylinders of the epoch of Sargon of Akkad, when the boundaries of the Babylonian Empire were pushed to the coasts of the Mediterranean, if not into Cyprus itself, and the great eastern plain of Cyprus was better fitted to provide clay for the tablet than any other Mediterranean district with which I am acquainted. That no written tablets have been found by the excavators in Cyprus is not surprising. In an island climate where heavy rains occur the unbaked tablet soon becomes hardly distinguishable from the earth in which it is embedded. It was almost by accident that even the practised eye of Dr. A. J. Evans was first led to notice the clay tablets of Knossos.