272

THE PALACE OF MINOS, ETC.

supposed to be a royal signet. The features 011 the sealings are sharply
characterized and the elder personage (a), with his high brach\ cephalic head
and aquiline nose seems, as already observed, to represent the old Anatolian
strain of Minoan Crete.1 It is hardly too much to conclude that we have here
an attempt to reproduce the actual lineaments of a Minoan Priest-King
and his infant son, who on other grounds may be roughly regarded as
the contemporaries of the Twelfth or early Thirteenth Dynasty of Egypt.

These interesting types occurred in a hoard of clay sealings, bars,
and ' labels ' impressed or inscribed with inscriptions of the advanced hiero-

a b
Fig. 201. Portrait Heads on Sealings: Hieroglyphic Deposit, Knossos

The
Hiero-
glyphic
Deposit.

lyphic Class B, found in an elongated chamber behind the steps of the Long-
Gallery of the Magazines at Knossos. It is known as the ' Hieroglyphic
Deposit' and undoubtedly had been covered over at the time of the great
catastrophe at the close of the M. M. II Period. On some of the sealings of
this hoard types occurred that show an extraordinarily picturesque develop-
ment in this branch of art (Fig. 202).2 We see a hart beside a water-brook
with rugged peaks beyond (a), a fish and sepia stranded, as if by a retiring-
wave, in a rocky pool {b), and what looks like a sea-grotto, possibly with

1 See Introductory Chapter {The Minoan
Age), pp. 6-9.

2 I was so impressed with the very advanced
style of some of these gem-impressions that
when writing the first volume of my Scripta
Minoa I was still inclined to bring down part
of this Deposit within the upper limits of the
M. M. Ill Period (see pp. 22, 23, and 143).

But the balance of probability seems to be in
favour of assigning it to the latest M. M. II
phase. In the stratified group of M. M. Ill
deposits referred to in the next Section there is
no trace of hieroglyphic inscriptions or sealings
and the inscribed documents connected with
them are consistently of the Linear Class A.