Why it should be unlikely that a people confessedly familiar with writing used it for the preservation of literature, when we know that even the Red Indians preserve their songs by means of pictographs, while West African tribes use incised characters, is certainly not obvious. Many sorts of prae-Phoenician writing were current during the Mycenaean age in Asia, Egypt, Assyria, and in Cyprus. As these other peoples used writing of their own sort for literary purposes, it is not easy to see why the Cretans, for example, should not have done the same thing. Indeed, Father Browne supposes that the Mycenaeans used "ordinary writing," and used it freely. Nevertheless, the Epic was not written, he says, till the sixth century B.C. Cauer, indeed, remarks that "the Finnish epic" existed unwritten till Lbnnrot, its Pisistratus, first collected it from oral recitation. {Footnote: Grundfragen der Homerkritik, p. 94.} But there is not, and never was, any "Finnish epic." There were cosmogonic songs, as among the Maoris and Zuсis—songs of the beginnings of things; there were magical songs, songs of weddings, a song based on the same popular tale that underlies the legend of the Argonauts. There were songs of the Culture Hero, songs of burial and feast, and of labour. Lцnnrot collected these, and tried by interpolations to make an epic out of them; but the point, as Comparetti has proved, is that he failed. There is no Finnish epic, only a mass of Volkslieder.Cauer's other argument, that the German popular tales, Grimm's tales, were unwritten till 1812, is as remote from the point at issue. Nothing can be less like an epic than a volume of Mдrchen.

As usual we are driven back upon a literary judgment. Is the Iliada patchwork of metrical Mдrchenor is it an epic nobly constructed? If it is the former, writing was not needed; if it is the latter, in the absence of Homeric guilds or colleges, only writing can account for its preservation.

It is impossible to argue against a critic's subjective sense of what is likely. Possibly that sense is born of the feeling that the Cretan linear script, for example, or the Cyprian syllabary, looks very odd and outlandish. The critic's imagination boggles at the idea of an epic written in such scripts. In that case his is not the scientific imagination; he is checked merely by the unfamiliar. Or his sense of unlikelihood may be a subconscious survival of Wolf's opinion, formed by him at a time when the existence of the many scripts of the old world was unknown.

Our own sense of probability leads us to the conclusion that, in an age when people could write, people wrote down the Epic. If they applied their art to literature, then the preservation of the Epic is explained. Written first in a prae-Phoenician script, it continued to be written in the Greek adaptation of the Phoenician alphabet. There was not yet, probably, a reading public, but there were a few clerkly men.

That the Cretans, at least, could write long before the age of Homer, Mr. Arthur Evans has demonstrated by his discoveries. Prom my remote undergraduate days I was of the opinion which he has proved to be correct, starting, like him, from what I knew about savage pictographs. {Footnote: Cretan Pictographsand Prae-PhoenicianScript. London, 1905. Annual of British Schoolof Athens, 1900-1901, p. 10. Journal of Hellenic Studies,1897, pp. 327-395.}

M. Reinach and Mr. Evans have pointed out that in this matter tradition joins hands with discovery. Diodorus Siculus, speaking of the Cretan Zeus and probably on Cretan authority, says: "As to those who hold that the Syrians invented letters, from whom the Phoenicians received them and handed them on to the Greeks, ... and that for this reason the Greeks call letters 'Phoenician,' some reply that the Phoenicians did not {blank space} letters, but merely modified (transposed 3) the forms of the letters, and that most men use this form of script, and thus letters came to be styled 'Phoenician.'" {Footnote: Diodorus Siculus, v. 74. L'Anthropologie,vol. xi. pp. 497-502.} In fact, the alphabet is a collection of signs of palaeolithic antiquity and of vast diffusion. {Footnote: Origins of the Alphabet. A. L. Fortnightly Review, 1904, pp. 634-645}

Thus the use of writing for the conservation of the Epic cannot seem to me to be unlikely, but rather probable; and here one must leave the question, as the subjective element plays so great a part in every man's sense of what is likely or unlikely. That writing cannot have been used for this literary purpose, that the thing is impossible, nobody will now assert.

My supposition is, then, that the text of the Epic existed in AEgean script till Greece adapted to her own tongue the "Phoenician letters," which I think she did not later than the ninth to eighth centuries; "at the beginning of the ninth century," says Professor Bury. {Footnote: History of Greece, vol. i. p. 78. 1902.} This may seem an audaciously early date, but when we find vases of the eighth to seventh centuries bearing inscriptions, we may infer that a knowledge of reading and writing was reasonably common. When such a humble class of hirelings or slaves as the pot-painters can sign their work, expecting their signatures to be read, reading and writing must be very common accomplishments among the more fortunate classes.

If Mr. Gardner is right in dating a number of incised inscriptions on early pottery at Naucratis before the middle of the seventh century, we reach the same conclusion. In fact, if these inscriptions be of a century earlier than the Abu Simbel inscriptions, of date 590 B.C., we reach 690 B.C. Wherefore, as writing does not become common in a moment, it must have existed in the eighth century B.C. We are not dealing here with a special learned class, but with ordinary persons who could write. {Footnote: The Early Ionic Alphabet: Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. vii. pp. 220-239. Roberts, Introduction to Greek Epigraphy, pp. 31, 151, 159, 164, 165-167}

Interesting for our purpose is the verse incised on a Dipylon vase, found at Athens in 1880. It is of an ordinary cream-jug shape, with a neck, a handle, a spout, and a round belly. On the neck, within a zigzag "geometrical" pattern, is a doe, feeding, and a tall water-fowl. On the shoulder is scratched with a point, in very antique Attic characters running from right to left, {Greek: os nun orchaeston panton hatalotata pais ei, tou tode}. "This is the jug of him who is the most delicately sportive of all dancers of our time." The jug is attributed to the eighth century. {Footnote: Walters, History of Ancient Pottery, vol. ii. p, 243; Kretschmer, Griechischen Vasen inschriften, p. 110, 1894, of the seventh century. H. von Rohden, Denkmaler, iii. pp. 1945, 1946: "Probably dating from the seventh century." Roberts, op. cit., vol. i. p. 74, "at least as far back as the seventh century," p. 75.}

Taking the vase, with Mr. Walters, as of the eighth century, I do not suppose that the amateur who gave it to a dancer and scratched the hexameter was of a later generation than the jug itself. The vase may have cost him sixpence: he would give his friend a newvase; it is improbable that old jugs were sold at curiosity shops in these days, and given by amateurs to artists. The inscription proves that, in the eighth to seventh centuries, at a time of very archaic characters (the Alpha is lying down on its side, the aspirate is an oblong with closed ends and a stroke across the middle, and the Iota is curved at each end), people could write with ease, and would put verse into writing. The general accomplishment of reading is taken for granted.

Reading is also taken for granted by the Gortyn (Cretan) inscription of twelve columns long, boustro-phedon(running alternately from left to right, and from right to left). In this inscribed code of laws, incised on stone, money is not mentioned in the more ancient part, but fines and prices are calculated in "chalders" and "bolls" ({Greek: lebaetes} and {Greek: tripodes}), as in Scotland when coin was scarce indeed. Whether the law contemplated the value of the vessels themselves, or, as in Scotland, of their contents in grain, I know not. The later inscriptions deal with coined money. If coin came in about 650 B.C., the older parts of the inscription may easily be of 700 B.C.