The first pictographs were evolved in the Early Minoan period (c. 2800-2600 B.C.), and are found on seal stones. It may be fairly assumed, therefore, that in Crete the first method of writing down ideas was by seal impressions. By the Middle Minoan period the seal stones are elongated, and contain a succession of designs, by which a connected chain of ideas could be reproduced. The lines of pictures are sometimes read from left to right, sometimes from right to left, a feature in which, as in others, they resemble the Hittite system of writing. In all cases the document is read in the direction in which the figures it contains are facing. _Scripta Minoa_ (p. 203) gives a typical example of this species: namely, a picture of a ship with two crescent moons, of which the probable meaning was a voyage of two months’ duration. The next step in the evolution of writing came, no doubt, when phonetic values were assigned to the pictures; that is, when the sound made in pronouncing the name of a given thing or person or action became associated with the conventional ideograph which represented that thing or person or action. When that happened, the same ideograph began to be used in writing out other, more complex, words in which the same _sound_ occurred, although in _meaning_ there was no connection with the original pictograph. To take a hypothetical example. Suppose we were in that stage of evolution to-day. We may have formed the habit of denoting an axe by a simple picture of that instrument; thereafter the sign of an axe would have become a symbol for spelling the same sound whenever it appeared in any other word. In spelling the word “accident,” for instance, we should start with the picture of an axe. This sort of thing seems to us mere “punning,” but it would cause no more difficulty or hesitation to the primitive writer than it would have, say, to Mr. Weller, senior, to whom the relation of the written to the spoken word and of words to things was still mysterious. Once begun, the method would be eagerly applied to fresh words. The first attempt at “syllabics,” or the writing out of a word by separate symbols for its separate syllables, was made more intelligible by the use of “determinatives.” By “determinative” is meant a pictographic representation of the idea denoted by the whole word. These we find appended to the spelling of a word in order to give the reader at least some inkling as to whether the word denoted mineral, animal or vegetable. A man’s name, for instance, would be followed by a picture of a man.