painted relief is the most magnificent monument of
Mycenaean plastic art that has come down to our time. The rendering
of the bull, for which the artists of the period showed so great
a predilection, is full of life and spirit. It combines in a high
degree naturalism with grandeur, and it is no exaggeration to say
that no figure of a bull, at once so powerful and so true, was
produced by later classical art.'[*] Plate XIII. shows that this
high praise is not undeserved; to match the naturalism of this
magnificent Minoan monster one must turn to the Old Kingdom tomb
reliefs of Egypt, or to the exquisite Eighteenth Dynasty statue of
a cow unearthed in 1906 by Naville from the Temple of Mentuhotep
Neb-hapet-Ra, at Deir-el-Bahri.

[Footnote *: _Annual of the British School at Athens_, vol. vi.,
p. 52.]

But the discovery which will doubtless prove in the end to be of
greater importance than any other, though as yet the main part of
its value is latent, was that of large numbers of clay tablets
incised with inscriptions in the unknown script of the Minoans. By
the end of March the finding of one tablet near the South Portico
gave earnest of future discoveries, and before the season ended
over a thousand had been collected from various deposits in the
palace. Of these deposits, one contained tablets written in
hieroglyphic; but the rest were in the linear script, 'a highly
developed form, with regular divisions between the words, and for
elegance scarcely surpassed by any later form of writing.' The
tablets vary in shape and size, some being flat, elongated bars
from two to seven and a half inches in length, while others are
squarer, ranging up to small octavo. Some of them, along with the
linear writing, supply illustrations of the objects to which the
inscriptions refer. There are human figures, chariots and horses,
cuirasses and axes, houses and barns, and ingots followed by a
balance, and accompanied by numerals which probably indicate their
value in Minoan talents. It looks as though these were documents
referring to the royal arsenals and treasuries. 'Other documents,
in which neither ciphers nor pictorial illustrations are to be
found, may appeal even more deeply to the imagination. The analogy
of the more or less contemporary tablets, written in cuneiform
script, found in the Palace of Tell-el-Amarna, might lead us to
expect among them the letters from distant governors or diplomatic
correspondence. It is probable