1938

-2-

I have just returned from having lunch with Dr.Hyde, whom I like better now, in spite of the fact that his course continues to be full of apalling errors. Personally he is very pleasant and sympathetic to my interests. My course here is fairly well decided on now. The first thing is to let the matter of the degree slide this year until Bates resigns. Hyde has no objection at all to my putting most of my emphasis on the historical aspect of things Greek, and emphasizing the early field and the Oriental connections. He and Speiser will supervise my thesis work.

The joint Oriental seminar continues to be the high spot of my work here. It is absolutely first class. It takes much more work than any other course I am taking, but I will really have something to show when I get through. We are still fighting over the earliest appearances of writing in the Near East.

Speiser gave several lectures on the splendid Mesopotamian evidence, punctuated by questions from Ranke; and Ranke has just finished talking about the pre-dynastic script of Egypt, which he discovered; Speiser has had many objections. Next Brown with talk about the earliest Indic writing and Bodde about Chinese, with possible Indic and Mesopotamian connections.

Then Harris will discuss the Ras Shamra alphabet in the last meeting of the writing series, which he will share with me, discussing the Minoan. Later I am to have a full two-hour session on the Early Minoan period in general. I am writing about the Minoan syllabary for Hyde's course too; I will put special emphasis on the Helladic and Cypriote outgrowths of it.

I must stop and get back to "Scripts Minoa". Please give my best to everybody.

Handwritten: Pete

Handwritten: As ever,