In studying the Linear Scripts of Minoan Crete, the first requisite is an agreed ‘signary,’ a customary order of the signs, with a numeration by which they can be quoted, at all events until their phonetic values are ascertained. Hitherto, everyone who has written on these scripts has had a signary-order of his own; and, at the risk of adding momentarily to this chaos, here is an attempt to arrange the signs of both the A- and the B-Scripts in an order which will be easy to memorise, because it will be based upon a classification of the signs by their forms and apparent origins.

Though Sir Arthur Evans described the Linear Scripts in general terms in Scripta Minoa I, 1909, he reserved detailed discussion to Vol. II, which was still unpublished at his death in 1940. But in The Palace of Minos I, in 1921, he printed a tabular numerical list of Script A, and in Vol. IV, in 1936, a similar list of Script B. Unfortunately, neither list is quite complete, and though there are many obvious resemblances between the two sets of signs, the numerical order of the two lists is different; so that it is difficult to construct vocabularies of the sign groups which can be cross-referred. In both lists he seems to have begun with the signs which more or less resembled letters in the Greek alphabet, but this principle of classification soon failed him. He grouped signs resembling animals and cereal crops at the end of Script B, but left other pictorial signs unclassified and mixed with purely linear forms. In The Palace of Minos IV, 681–2, is outlined a classification into phonetic, idiographic, commodity-signs ‘relating to various properties,’ and administrative signs; but it was not developed in detail.