Evans, inspired by finds such as these, also took to heart the myths of Homeric epics.   In Evans’ case, the myths that guided him to Crete were those of Theseus and the Minotaur.  According to Greek myth, King Minos, a tyrant law-giver, had a wife who was punished by the Greek god Zeus with a passion for a bull; from the which she gave birth to a monster, half-man and half-bull, called the Minotaur.  This monster was kept in an underground labyrinth created by the famous architect Daedalus.  As the story would have it, each year the monster fed on human flesh, young men and maidens exacted as tribute by Minos from his subjugated cities.   This continued for years until the hero Theseus finally slew the Minotaur and put an end to the yearly slaughter of men and women.  He succeeded in escaping the labyrinth himself with the aid of King Minos’ own daughter, Ariadne.

It was with these stories in mind that Arthur Evans (following up on a lead of Minos Kalokairinos who had uncovered ruins at Knossos a few years before) started excavating in earnest on Crete in the year 1899.  The finds at Knossos proved to be spectacular, revealing an intricate maze of buildings, pottery, pillars and frescoes.  In keeping with Homeric myth, Evans dubbed the ruins at Knossos the “Palace of Minos,” and gave the name “Minoan” to the civilization of Bronze Age Crete.   By the end of 1903 almost all of the palace had been uncovered and work began on the surrounding area.  The excavations were interrupted by WWI, after which Evans continued his work to excavate and reconstruct the palace until 1938.  He was knighted in 1911, and in 1921 published the first volume of his most famous work, the four volume opus entitled The Palace of Minos at Knossos. 

Evans is a significant figure in the fields of anthropology and archaeology for a number of reasons.  It was Evans who conceived of the Minoan timeline, dividing the periods of Bronze Age Cretan culture into three distinct sections (similar to Egyptian dynastic divisions): the Early, Middle, and Late Minoan.  This division of time has been revised somewhat by later scholars, but basically remains intact.  Evans popularized the world of Aegean civilization, and brought to life through years of work the elaborate ruins on Crete.  Under his direction his chief assistant kept a basic daily log of the excavations, which was a far more scientific approach to the excavation process than his predecessors had demonstrated. 

However, Evans is also significant as an example of what NOT to do in regard to archaeological excavation and restoration.  Soon after unearthing the palace ruins at Knossos - exposed for the first time in hundreds of years - the weather began to erode the finds.  Evans set about on a plan of protection and reconstruction.  The rebuilding of Knossos, using contemporary materials, was as much a product of Evans’ fertile imagination as it was of scholarship or research.  He recreated what he believed to be the “labyrinth” and the palace of King Minos.  Unfortunately, he drew more on his own contemporary sensibility than science when reconstructing the ancient ruins.  The interiors of the reconstructed palace therefore bear a striking similarity to Art Deco, a style that was popular at the time of Evans' restoration.. 

One aspect of Evans reconstruction that has been particularly condemned by modern day archaeologists has been his attempt to cover over the remnants of the original buildings, blending the old with the new seamlessly, such that an onlooker cannot really tell which is the ancient building and which the facsimile.  Evans’ reconstruction of the palace is mainly what is available to be viewed now on the island of Crete, although archaeologists have for some time now attempted to “undo” the blending of the two constructions, so that visitors can tell the difference.  Evans influence has been therefore to serve as a reminder of the dangers of grafting modern day views onto an ancient world.  Since Evans time, attempts to “restore” in the way of covering over or re-creating new buildings over the original ruins, is rejected by scholars.  Moreover it is now often the practice, when excavating a new site, to leave a portion of it undisturbed, so that later generations perhaps with better technology, can use their methods to gain more knowledge about the site by having some of it left to excavate.

“The European Diffusion of Primitive Pictography and its Bearings on the Origin of Script.”  By A.J. Evans.  (Maret, R.R., editor.)  Anthropology and the Classics: Six Lectures Delivered before the University of Oxford.  Barnes & Noble, New York - c. 1908, 1966.
 

Fresh from his discoveries at Knossos, and shortly after Schliemann’s discoveries at Mycenae, Evans delivered this lecture at Oxford on the two forms of script writing found in Crete (now called Linear A and Linear B).  In this lecture, Evans compares and contrasts early pictographic writing from France, Scandinavia, and the Mediterranean.  He starts with the history of writing from the cave dwellers of the late Paleolithic, who painted walls with the figures of animals.  Evans refers to these rudimentary forms as the “Reindeer Period.”  He then traces the development of writing from these pictorial representations to writing he describes as “alphabetiform.” 

Evans asserts that a true system of writing was not established by later Paleolithic man.  Rather, he wishes to convince his readers that the Minoan civilization (which he “discovered”) had developed the first complex and civilized form of writing above and beyond other civilizations at that time.  Evans states:  “The clay archives found in the Palace of Knossos and elsewhere have proved that the prehistoric Cretan had already, a thousand years before the appearance of the first written record of Classical Greece, passed through every stage in the evolution of a highly developed style of script.”  (Evans 41).  He further imagines that the Minoan script is the source or cradle of other developments in language.  “If we turn to Crete, the source of the developed pre-Phoenician scripts of Greece, and the Aegean world, we find evidence of the same primitive stratum of linearized pictography… the conventionalized pictography of Crete, if it does not give us the actual source of the later Phoenician letters, at least supplies the best illustration of the elements out of which it was evolved.” (Evans 42)

Unfortunately for Evans, it was later discovered in the 1950’s by a man named Michael Ventris that the linear writing found in Crete was in fact Greek.  This renders his lecture somewhat useless for present day anthropologists, except as an example of the way in which human beings can fashion facts to suit their own needs and desires.  Evans wished to believe that his great discoveries were the determining factors in the evolution of civilization.  In truth, the best we can ascertain is that the civilization that evolved on Crete was part of a much more complex process that included a strong relationship to the Greek mainland.

The lecture, published in 1908, serves mainly to reveal the attitudes of the time.  The field of anthropology at the turn of the century was soundly built on an evolutionary  model of culture that stemmed from the acceptance of Charles Darwin’s theories of biological evolution.   Man was seen as progressing from a primitive state to a civilized one: from belief in magic, to belief in religion, to a belief in science.  This inherently ethnocentric view posits the “primitive” cultures such as African or Australian aboriginal tribes as progressing along an evolutionary track that would lead them eventually to the “civilized” culture of Europe. So it was that at the time Evans delivered his lecture at Oxford, anthropology was deemed the study of “primitive” or “lower” culture.  This was in contrast to the study of the civilization of Ancient Greece, which was considered an expression of higher culture.  The lectures at Oxford, of which Evans was only one, were devised to explore what these men believed to be the transition from lower to higher forms of human existence.  Says Maret in his 1908 introduction:

“Anthropology and the Humanities… in practice they divide the domain of human culture between them.  The types of human culture are, in fact, reducible to two, a simpler and a more complex, or, as we are wont to say, (valuing our own achievements, I doubt not, rightly) a lower and a higher… anthropology occupies itself solely with culture of the simpler or lower kind.  The humanities, on the other hand… concentrate on... the higher life of society.” 

Evans lecture serves as a humbling reminder not to allow our own hubris to interfere with the understanding and study of other cultures and societies.

Evans, Arthur J.  (1928)  The Palace of Minos: A Comparative Account of the Successive Stages of the Early Cretan Civilization as Illustrated by the Discoveries at Knossos. Vols. I-IV.  London: Macmillan and Co.

I located a copy of Evan’s four volume set The Palace of Minos at a local university.  It is quite an impressive work.  The first volume was published in 1921, and the final volume in 1935.  In his introduction Evans acknowledges that these volumes are an expansion and reiteration of the reports he submitted and published in the Annual of the British School of Athens between the years 1901-1908 - that is, in the years following his discoveries.  This virtual encyclopedia of Evans’ finds at Knossos contains textual descriptions of each artifact - the pottery, architecture, and artwork of Minoan culture - and boasts of literally hundreds of color plates, drawings, maps and illustrations.  By the time the first volume was completed, Evans had been knighted and made professor of Prehistoric Archaeology at Oxford.

It was Evans who in this work coined the term “Minoan” for the civilization he uncovered and offered and explanation for the time scheme he formulated for the prehistoric civilization of Crete.  He identified three periods: Early, Middle and Late Minoan.  He modeled his Cretan time periods after those assigned to Egyptian dynasties.  After some adjustments the time scheme was accepted by scholars and survives until this day - unlike some of Evans’ other assertions.

Evans, inspired by myth, recounts the story of King Minos the rule giver, patron of the arts, as well of tyrant and keeper of the Minotaur.  He uses the Palace of Minos as a forum for defending his choice of terms for defining the civilization. “The dynastic use of the word ‘Minos’,” says Evans, “may perhaps be compared with that of Pharoah, originally signifying him of the ‘great house’...  ‘Minoan’ may thus be fairly paralleled with ‘Pharoahic’ as a term for the dynastic civilization of Egypt.” (Evans 3)  Despite his bombast, Evans has the good grace to cite some of his critics who had objections to his use of nomenclature, especially the word ‘Minoan’. He cites Sir William Ridgeway who said: “a more imperative reason for rejecting the name ‘Minoan’ [is that,] as it is now being used by Dr. Evans and his followers, it deliberately assumes that all Bronze Age culture of the Aegean radiates from [K]nossos.” (Evans 13)   Evans counters that this would only be true if he had named the culture “Knossian.”

The Palace of Minos is a complex, extensive, and highly detailed work, annotated with notes in the margins, and containing illustrations of the layout and floor plans of the palace and its various rooms.  Evans attempts to describe and illustrate the typical ceramics and metalwork, art and architecture he associated with each Minoan period - these include ceramics, libation vessels or rhytons in the shape of animals, especially bulls, bull-leaping frescos and figurines, bronze daggers and weapons.  In addition, he describes the man-size pottery jars which were found lining the sides of the structures.  “While the great store jars served for the most part to contain oil, the storage of solid possessions such as grain or produce… seems to have been mainly effected… by means of pits or repositories beneath the floors.” (Evans 236)  He also describes the two kinds of linear writing found at Knossos on clay tablets.  These have come to be known as Linear A and Linear B.  There are also illustrations of strata and notes on where and at what level the ruins were found, as well as description of the excavation and the layers of structures.

In addition, Evans even concerns himself with the more mundane matters of Minoan life, such as sewers and drainage, mentioning the unearthing of terra cotta waterpipes and large stone drains.   “At Knossos both in the north and east sides are well-preserved remains of widely ramifying systems in which a part is played both by descending shafts and by well-constructed stone drains, large enough to admit the passage of a man.” (Evans 225)

Evans used myth as a treasure map to find a great civilization, but how much of what is described in the Palace of Minos is speculation and how much is research remains an important question.  Clearly Evans was inspired to project his own imagination onto the naming of some of the finds: the “Throne of the Priest-Kings," for example, or the famous frescoe “La Parisienne.”  Evans refers to his excavations as “campaigns” and when reading this work it does have the air rather like a Victorian general, surfeited in self-confidence, mounting an assault on the past.  Nevertheless, the volumes are themselves evidence of true passion and commitment to the restoration and documentation of a civilization, and is a commendable achievement.

Evans, Arthur John.. Encyclopedia Brittanica Online.  Retrieved June 20, 2001.

Evans, Arthur John.  Encyclopedia.com.  Retrieved June 26, 2001.

History Today: Arthur Evans Begins to Dig in Crete.  Retrieved June 25, 2001.

Krieg, Rob.  (2001).  The Palace of Knossos.  University of Richmond. Retrieved June 25, 2001.

MacGillivray, Joseph Alexander.  (2000) Minotaur: Sir Arthur Evans and the Archaeology of the Minoan Myth.  New York: Hill and Wang.