Explorations in Greece and the surrounding archipelago within the last few years have brought to light a third venerable centre of culture. About thirty years ago Dr. Schliemann, digging in prehistoric soil, believed that he had found the palace of Odysseus and the towers of Ilios. "The bones of Agamemnon are a show." The world laughed at him, but, if it takes a more sober view of his discoveries than Schliemann did, it has come to recognise their value and to prosecute his work. The remarkable result of these discoveries is, in the words of Mr. D. G. Hogarth, to show that "man in Hellas was more highly civilised before history than when history begins to record his state; and there existed human society in the Hellenic area, organised and productive, to a period so remote that its origins were more distant from the age of Pericles than that age is from our own. We have probably to deal with a total period of civilisation in the Ægean not much shorter than in the Nile Valley." (_Authority and Archæology_, p. 230.) The general subject cannot be pursued here, and we have to keep to the narrower track opened up within the past five years in the island of Crete by Mr. Arthur J. Evans. His discoveries there establish (1) the fact of an indigenous culture, and (2) of an active intercourse between Crete and Greece, Egypt, Syria, and other countries centuries before the Phœnicians launched their craft upon the midland sea and trafficked with Cypriote and Cretan, or sailed beyond the Pillars of Hercules. Full accounts of Mr. Evans's important work have for the most part been contributed by him from time to time to the memoirs of learned societies, but no statement in popular form has yet appeared. What now follows will therefore be in large degree an abstract of his paper on "Primitive Pictographs and a Præ-Phœnician Script from Crete and the Peloponnese," published in the _Journal of Hellenic Studies_, vol. xiv., Part II., 1894, pp. 270-372, and reprinted under the title _Cretan Pictographs_, 1895.