Minoan civilization and other countries—to apply the name 'Minoan'." Evans said that he applied it, not invented it. Hoeck, with no idea that the archaeological Crete had existed, had in mind the Crete of mythology. Although Evans' 1931 claim that the term was "unminted" before he used it was called a "brazen suggestion" by Karadimas and Momigliano, he coined its archaeological meaning. Instead of dating the Minoan period, archaeologists use two systems of relative chronology. The first, created by Evans and modified by later archaeologists, is based on pottery styles and imported Egyptian artifacts (which can be correlated with the chronology of
Cypro-Minoan syllabary originated or about the underlying language. However, its use continued into the early Iron Age, forming a link to the Cypriot syllabary, which has been deciphered as Greek. Arthur Evans considered the Cypro-Minoan syllabary to be a result of uninterrupted evolution of the Minoan Linear A script. He believed that the script was brought to Cyprus by Minoan colonizers or immigrants. Evans' theory was uncritically supported until recently, when it was shown that the earliest Cypro-Minoan inscriptions were separated from the earliest texts in Linear A by less than a century, yet the Cypro-Minoan script at its earliest stage was