one of the earliest Phœnician colonies established in the Ægean by Cadmus, son of the Phœnician King Agenor of Tyre,[1] and uncle of King Minos of Crete,[2] and that colony had existed for eight generations when the Dorians arrived. These inscriptions, found on ancient tombstones of Phœnicians and Dorians at Thera are accounted, along with the retrograde inscriptions there, "the oldest extant monuments of the alphabet of Greece"[3] — Cadmean letters being arbitrarily called "Grecian" by modern writers. And whilst the reversed Cadmean writing there is believed to be earlier than the ninth century B.C. Moabite Stone (see col. 5), the non-reversed is generally assumed by Taylor and others to date no earlier than about "the seventh century B.C."; but in the light of our new evidence this inference does not necessarily appear to follow. Yet, in view of the large proportion of the early Cadmean inscriptions at Thera and at some other ancient sites being written in reversed direction, it seems probable that Cadmus and his Phœnicians, like the Indo-Aryan Emperor Asoka (see col. 11), occasionally wrote their inscriptions in reversed direction at sites where the native subjects were Semites who were accustomed to the sinister direction in the Moon-cult of their Mother-goddess, as opposed to the sun-wise right-hand direction of the Aryan Solar-cult. And in the old Hittite hieroglyph inscriptions the opening line is usually in reverse direction, from right to left.
It is also noteworthy that some of the Cadmean inscriptions at Thera, as at several other ancient sites in Asia Minor are written in the direction of the Hittite hieroglyphs, the so-called "Ox-plough-wise" (Boustrophedon) direction, that is to say the first line reads from right to left, the second line continues below the end of the first line and reads from left to right as in ordinary Aryan writing, and the third line
