This article suggests that there is considerable interest today in what can be

described as the history of scholarship. Works such as William McDonald and

Carol Thomas's Progress into the Past and J. Lesley Fitton's The Discovery of the
Greek Bronze Age give excellent accounts of the historical development of Bronze
Age scholarship and of Aegean archaeology. Mention should also be made of the
excellent short handbook by Carol Thomas, Myth Becomes History: Pre-Classical
Greece, written for students of ancient history and containing extensive
bibliography. It was the study of seal stones from Crete and their possible evidence
for early pictographic writing that first involved Arthur Evans in the antiquities of
the island and led to one of his earliest publications, Cretan Pictographs and Prae-
Phoenician Scripts. The study of Minoan and Mycenaean seal stones and clay
sealings soon developed into one of the major research areas in Bronze Age
archaeology.