The Cretans had a system of writing as long ago as 2500 B.C. The language therein embodied is still a mystery to us, in spite of Sir Arthur Evans’s monumental work _Scripta Minoa_ (1909). The hope is that Sir Arthur will find a clue to the mystery, but up to the present the fact is that there is no starting-point for any attempt at interpretation. If a bilingual inscription could be found--a Cretan document, that is, side by side with a translation in some known language such as Egyptian--a start could be made. It was inevitable that the art of writing should be evolved early in the history of man. Even in the most primitive stages of life there would be the elementary necessity, for instance, of identifying one’s own property, and for this the most likely means would be some system of marking. Then, again, the development of communal life would entail the duty of keeping appointments, or of doing a particular thing at a particular time. It would, one thinks, have been too much of a strain, even for the mind of a Stone Age man, to keep all the details of his daily, still more of his annual, routine in his head, and the handkerchiefs of those remote days may not have been of such a material as to lend themselves readily to mnemonic knots. It is quite conceivable, as an instance of the sort of necessity that would arise, that at a given time it could be calculated how many days ahead the provisions would last, and when, therefore, the hunter must be ready for the hills. He might prepare a handy reminder with a pictographic representation of some commonplace event that was to take place at the same time, and by hanging the picture up in an obvious spot. One’s range of activity would increase as time went on, and it might conceivably be necessary to deliver a message to a man over on the other side of the valley in circumstances where one could not take it oneself. Such a contingency would produce some form of written message, for the message might be private or unsuitable for oral transmission by a third party. To give a concrete example from later times: Proitus wanted to kill Bellerophon, but did not want to do it himself; he therefore sent the doomed man to the King of Lycia “with letters of introduction written on a folded tablet, containing much ill against the bearer ... that he might be slain” (Homer, “Iliad,” vi. 169). Not all people are original enough to transmit such a communication orally by the bearer.