Fifty, even forty, years ago it was the general doctrine of Greek scholars that the Homeric poems were never written down till long after they were composed, perhaps even, so some thought, not until 560 B.C. Till then, we used to be taught, they were preserved wholly by memory and by oral transmission. But on the strength of the above passage from Homer--the only passage in either “Iliad” or “Odyssey” where writing is mentioned--Andrew Lang in 1883 argued that the art of writing must have been known to the early Greeks. “It is almost incredible,” he said, “that the quick-witted Greeks should have neglected an art which met them everywhere in Egypt and Asia.” He argued better than he knew. Not only was the art of writing known to the early Greeks, but it was known to their forerunners a few thousand years earlier, forerunners whose very existence was not suspected when Andrew Lang wrote. Curiously there had been found no trace of writing in the Mycenæan remains, although this fact has since been shown to be due to mere chance. In 1893 Sir (then Mr.) Arthur Evans caused general astonishment by communicating to the Hellenic Society his discovery of the fact that certain seal stones which he had found in Greece, and which had been assumed to be Peloponnesian, were, in fact, Cretan. This startling revelation was clinched during the years that followed by the discovery of further specimens of Cretan writing. Excavation in Crete was started in 1900, and the first year’s work yielded up hundreds of clay tablets inscribed with Cretan writing. Was Homer writing fairy stories when he made Proitus send his doomed Bellerophon to Lycia with his “folded tablet”? Or did he know that the Lycians were colonists from Crete? A tentative sketch of the successive phases through which the art of writing passed may be made, even if it largely depends upon unconfirmed surmise. The temptation to fill in the gaps by what seems reasonable conjecture is hard to resist. Minoan writing must have started, quite naturally, with simple pictographs, such as have, in fact, been found--simple pictures of a man, a leg, a ship, representing a definite thing that it was desired to indicate. They are called “ideographs” because they signify a single idea. They next developed into “hieroglyphs,” that is, pictures which had acquired by association a certain use among the people who employed them, but whose original meaning has been lost, and can now only be inferred. In the parallel case of Egyptian hieroglyphics, guessing at such meanings has been shown to be dangerous work, for in many cases the established interpretation is far other than what one might have supposed.