IN this book the experiment is tried of assigning modern Basque values to the Minoan characters on bronze age tablets from Crete. As Mr. Gordon says (p. 1), “such a method must obviously begin as pure guess-work”. It also ends there; for “not only did the system yield a language indistinguishable (at present) from Basque, but it revealed unmistakable references to Hellenic deities, several old Greek names, and three poems, one in hexameter verse, one in elegiac, and one in couplets …” etc. Basque is lovely for the purpose: “the language is highly fluid, the aspirate is uncertain, and inversions are common” (p. 2); and “it appears to make no distinction between B, P, and M, T and N, G and K, L and R, O and U”. It was also “an obvious convenience” that “the authors of the script were able to select signs with several meanings” (p. 3); and Mr. Gordon's “method”, as he frankly says (p. 4), “consists in applying a series of hypothetical values, and endeavouring to show that they fit everywhere”. For example (p. 9), with a sign which “appears to represent a conical eminence of some kind, and is provisionally rendered iaq or iq, Basque ik, ‘height’”, he thinks it “possible to write the plural., the agential suffix, the partitive suffix, the past participle, and the imperative singular, besides iising the sign as a connecting link”. English itself has never attempted as much; and it is not. surprising that “it would constantly occur, therefore, as in fact it does”. Another sign (for “a beard, bizal, Basque bizar”) “may also stand for a univalve of contorted type” (for which no Basque word is given), because it “stands as a decoration in a marine subject”, being in fact what the Germans call a “Fullenornament” of the commonest, in Late Minoan pot-painting. Through Basque to Minoan: Transliterations and Translations of the Minoan Tablets. By F. G. Gordon. Pp. v + 83. (London: Oxford University Press, 1931.) 10s. 6d. net.