The tablets had been stored in coffers of wood, clay, or gypsum. The wooden coffers had perished in the great conflagration which destroyed the palace, and only their charred fragments remained; but the destroying fire had probably contributed to the preservation of the precious writings within, by baking more thoroughly the clay of which they were composed. As yet, in spite of all efforts, it has not proved possible to decipher the inscriptions, for there has so far been no such good fortune as the discovery of a bilingual inscription to do for Minoan what the Rosetta Stone did for Egyptian hieroglyphics. But it is not beyond the bounds of probability that there may yet come to light some treaty between Crete and Egypt which may put the key into the eager searcher's hands, and enable us to read the original records of this long-forgotten kingdom (Plate XIV.). [Illustration XI: PILLAR OF THE DOUBLE AXES (_p_. 70)] Even as it is, the discovery of these tablets has altered the whole conception of the relative ages of the various early beginnings of writing in the Eastern Mediterranean area. The Hellenic script is seen to have been in all likelihood no late-born child of the Phoenician, but to have had an ancestor of its own race; and the old Cretan tradition on which Dr. Evans relied at the commencement of his work, has proved to be amply justified. 'In any case,' said Dr. Evans, summing up his first year's results, 'the weighty question, which years before I had set myself to solve on Cretan soil, has found, so far at least, an answer. That great early civilization was not dumb, and the written records of the Hellenic world were carried back some seven centuries beyond the date of the first-known historic writings. But what, perhaps, is even more remarkable than this, is that, when we examine in detail the linear script of these Mycenaean documents, it is impossible not to recognize that we have here a system of writing, syllabic and perhaps partly alphabetic, which stands on a distinctly higher level of development than the hieroglyphs of Egypt, or the cuneiform script of contemporary Syria and Babylonia. It is not till some five centuries later that we find the first dated examples of Phoenician writing.'[*] [Footnote *: _Monthly Review_, March, 1901, p. 130.]