Anthropology and the classics : six lectures delivered before the University of Oxford . ofpainted signs on a rock-face above a sacred grotto,and in a somewhat inaccessible position. They con-sisted mainly of animals and varieties of the swastikasign. That they were of pre-Christian date may beregarded as certain, but a fuller investigation ofthem at my own hands was cut short by force majeure. Up to the present the old pictography of the landsbetween the Adriatic and the Black Sea and the lowerDanubian basin is best illustrated by the linearincised figures found on the primitive pottery of th
Anthropology and the classics : six lectures delivered before the University of Oxford . ofpainted signs on a rock-face above a sacred grotto,and in a somewhat inaccessible position. They con-sisted mainly of animals and varieties of the swastikasign. That they were of pre-Christian date may beregarded as certain, but a fuller investigation ofthem at my own hands was cut short by force majeure. Up to the present the old pictography of the landsbetween the Adriatic and the Black Sea and the lowerDanubian basin is best illustrated by the linearincised figures found on the primitive pottery of thatregion. The best collection of such signs is due tothe researches of Fraulein Torma, at Broos, in Tran-sylvania. In view of the ethnic and archaeologicalconnexions which are shown to have existed betweenthe lower Danubian regions and the western part ofAsia, it is specially interesting to note the analogiesthat these Transylvanian graffiti present with thosenoted by Schliemann on the whorls and pottery ofHissarlik (Fig. 21).1 Both groups, moreover, belong 1 Ilios, Whori No. 1983. *. Fig. 20. PRIMITIVE PICTOGRAPHY 4i approximately to the same epoch, marked by thetransition from the Neolithic to the Early MetalAge. That many of these signs are linearistic degenera-tions of animal and other figures is clear, and suchfigures may be reasonably considered to have anideographic sense. But from this to investing themarks on a primitive whorl or pot with a definitephonetic value, and proceeding to read them off bythe aid of the Cypriote syllabary of the Greeklanguage as it existed some two thousand years later,can only be described as a far cry. Linearized signsof altogether alphabeticappearance belong, as al-ready shown, to the verybeginnings of humanculture. In the case ofthe whorls, moreover,many of the linearfigures are really repeti-tions of similar marksdue to the decay of aborder pattern—a phe-nomenon already paralleled1 by some of the engravedgroups of the Reindeer Period. A
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