Into quite a different category from any of the ordinary Minoan tablets comes the disc found at Phaestos in 1908. Its general character has been already described. The long inscription which covers both of its faces is written in a form of hieroglyphics which, to some extent, resembles the Minoan pictographic system, but is not the same. The crested helmets which occur frequently as signs, the round shields, the fashion of dress of both men and women, and the style of architecture depicted in the hieroglyphic rendering of a house or pagoda, are not Minoan; and, on the whole, the evidence seems to point to the disc being the product of some allied culture, perhaps Lycian, in which a language closely akin to that of Minoan Crete was used. The inscription on the disc is carefully balanced and arranged, and each side contains exactly the same number of sign-groups, with one additional group on face A, which is separated from the preceding part of the inscription by a dash. Certain sets of sign-groups recur in the same order, as though they constituted some kind of refrain. From these indications it has been suggested that the whole inscription is a metrical composition, a short poem or hymn--perhaps one leaf of an Anatolian Book of Psalms whose other pages have perished. It is agreed that the language and religion of the western coast of Asia Minor were closely allied to those of Crete, and it is possible that when the Minoans developed their own language on somewhat different lines from the mainlanders, they maintained in parts of their religious service the old form of the speech common to themselves and their Anatolian relatives, as a kind of sacred language.[*] [Footnote *: See Appendix, p. 264.]