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Sir Arthur Evans
Contrary
to popular opinion, Arthur Evans did not ‘discover’
Knossos nor the Minoan civilization—although
he did give it its name. A number of travellers
had already identified the ruins just inland from
Heraklion as the site of ancient Knossos and the
Labyrinth from Classical descriptions. Trial excavations
were undertaken there in 1878 by the aptly named
Minos Kalokairinos who came from a wealthy family
of Heraklion merchants. He uncovered painted walls
and pottery similar to that unearthed by Schliemann
at Mycenae but the local authorities prevented
any further digging. They feared that the finds
would be expropriated by the Turks (who still
ruled Crete) and taken to Istanbul. But in 1894
he showed his finds to Arthur Evans who had come
to the island in search of information about the
strange inscriptions he had seen on tablets in
Oxford and Athens. As it turned out, these were
written in the early Greek Linear B script and
Kalokairinos was able to show him more examples
along with other material excavated at Knossos.
After seeing the site for himself, Evans was determined
to dig there. He even had a name for the civilization
whose remains he expected to find. He called it
‘Minoan’ after the legendary king
of Crete and spent the rest of his life trying
to define it.
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Arthur
Evans was born in 1851 in Hertfordshire England, the
son of Sir John Evans, one of the fathers of prehistoric
archaeology, and was brought up among archaeologists
and antiquarians. He possessed an unusual amount of
toughness and discipline, having served as war correspondent
for the Manchester Guardian in Bosnia during the 1870’s.
While in London in 1878, he saw an exhibition of Schliemann’s
material from Troy and visited him in Athens five years
later. A distinguished scholar, he was curator of the
Ashmolean Museum from 1884 to 1908 and became extraordinary
professor of prehistoric archaeology at Oxford in 1909.
He visited Crete for the first time in 1894 where he
met with Minos Kalokairinos and visited the site of
Knossos. Three years later he purchased the land on
which the site of Knossos was located and spent the
rest of his life excavating its remains and interpreting
them.
Aerial
View of Knossos from the South
Evan’s
Excavations at Knossos
The
site stands on a knoll between the confluence of two
streams and is located about five miles (8 kilometres)
inland from Heraklion on Crete’s northern coast.
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Excavations
did not begin until the spring of 1900— two
years after Crete gained her independence from the
Ottoman Empire. Evans started work in the area investigated
by Kalokairinos 20 years before and immediately
came upon the remains of what he described as the
‘Throne Room of Minos’. Walls with painted
frescoes appeared mere inches below the surface—apparently
undisturbed for over 3000 years. They survived to
a height of about two metres and were lined with
gypsum benches. On one side was a gypsum throne
and on the other a sunken room which Evans called
a ‘Lustral Basin’. Over the course of
the next four years, most of the ten-acre site had
been excavated— although work would continue
off and on until 1930. |
The
site proved to have been continuously occupied from
the Neolithic Period (c. 7000 BC) until its destruction
in the 13th century BC nearly six thousand years later.
Evans was struck by the apparent absence of fortifications
around the site and took this as confirmation of the
‘Thalassocracy of Minos’ described by Thucydides.
As the product of the Victorian Age and the Pax
Britannia, he found it easy to identify with a
civilization whose power apparently dervied from control
of the sea-lanes and the trade that flowed along them.
Restored Portico
His results and methods have come under criticism since
his death in 1941. In part this is due to the standards
of his day. He and his assistant, Duncan Mackenzie, had
to personally supervise anywhere from 50 to 180 men and
obviously could not be everywhere at once. Under the circumstances,
it is hardly surprising that there has been some controversy
over the recording and interpretation of the evidence.
Normally, any questions raised subsequently can be cleared
up by further excavations. Unfortunately, this has been
effectively precluded by the
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major restorations undertaken by Evans on what was,
after all, his property. Many of these can be justified
in the
name of conservation—the throne room and its
frescoes would have suffered irreparable damage
if left exposed. Structural elements, such as the
columns that support the Grand Staircase, had been
made of wood that had long since rotted away. They
were replaced by cement versions. However, Evans
went well beyond this and restored many elements
that had not survived—the layout of the upper
storeys of the East and West wings, for example.
Altogether,
Evans' restorations provide a very rewarding experience
for most visitors, giving them a much more vivid
impression of what the site must have looked like
in its heyday than its ‘bare bones’
would have presented. However, it is also true
that they have largely precluded further excavation
of the palace using more modern methods to recover
information that would have escaped Evans and
to resolve problems in interpretation. Nevertheless,
he remains a true giant in his field and will
be forever famous as the man who brought the Minoans
and the glories of their unique civilization to
light.
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