The Riddle of the Labyrinth Page 3

  As Evans squinted at a coin, engraved gem, or other tiny artifact held directly before his eyes, he could make out fine details many other experts missed. It is fair to say that had Arthur Evans not been so terribly myopic, the Linear B tablets at Knossos would not have been found when they were. For a series of clues so minute that only he could interpret them had told him where to dig.

  BY THE MID-1880s, the Greek Bronze Age had begun to exert its hold on Evans. After his expulsion from the Balkans, he chafed in England and was soon beset by his constitutional wanderlust. He could not go back to Ragusa. Instead, in 1883, he journeyed with Margaret to Greece.

  In Athens, the Evanses called on Schliemann himself. Now in his early sixties, Schliemann lived there in profuse splendor with his beautiful young Greek wife, surrounded by his glittering spoils. He regaled the couple with tales of his digs and showed them some of his finds, including gold jewelry and small, beadlike gemstones engraved with naturalistic designs. As a result of the visit, and the five months he and Margaret spent traveling in Greece afterward, Evans grew fascinated by the Mycenaean world.

  In the Victorian age, the widely accepted view of Greek history was that it had begun in 776 B.C., the date of the first known Olympics. The Greek alphabet, borrowed from the Phoenicians not long before, had made writing possible, and with it, recorded history. The Classical Era, with its spectacular achievements in arts, letters, and science, would follow soon afterward, at its height spanning the seventh to the fourth centuries B.C. Before the Classical Era, historians believed, lay a long Greek Dark Age. Lasting from about 1200 to 800 B.C., it was a time in which literacy, high art, and skilled architecture were unknown in Greek lands. By Homer’s day, circa 800 B.C., Greece was “at a comparatively low level of civilization,” as John Chadwick wrote in 1976. And yet, he added, the Greece Homer describes in his epics—the Greece of five centuries earlier—“is a network of well-organized kingdoms capable of joint military action; its kings live in luxurious stone-built palaces, adorned with gold, ivory and other precious metals.”

  Homeric epics were composed and transmitted orally: There was, after all, no alphabet with which to write them down. Yet in those epics, as Chadwick noted, Homer sang about writing:

  When Homer describes a letter entrusted to a traveller—it was, ironically, a request for the bearer to be quietly liquidated—Homer describes it as something exotic and almost magical; writing was no more than a dim memory. But some idea of the Mycenaean world could well have been passed down through the Dark Ages to Homer, and the tradition of verse-making may go back to the Mycenaean palaces.

  Nineteenth-century scholars dismissed Homer’s accounts of Bronze Age life as pure poetic fancy. The glories of Classical Greece, the strong implication went, had sprung full blown from the long cultural vacuum that preceded them.

  Unlike most historians, Arthur Evans had grown up with his hands in the grit of prehistory. When he was eight, his father and two colleagues had unearthed Stone Age implements from a gravel pit in the Somme River valley in France. In so doing, as Joseph Alexander MacGillivray wrote in Minotaur, his life of Arthur Evans, they helped prove to the religious and scholarly communities “that human beings had lived on this earth for a far greater time than the clerics had allowed for.” As an older boy, Arthur often accompanied his father on digs; while studying in Germany, he undertook a dig of his own at a Roman site in Trier.

  To Evans, the idea that Classical Greece had arisen out of nowhere was absurd. It was plain to him that Greek civilization, like any other, had come from somewhere—an idea Schliemann’s Mycenaean discoveries only served to reinforce. Returning from Greece to Oxford, he began to think deeply about the Mycenaeans and what their influence on the Greek Classical Age might have been.

  Schliemann’s dig at Mycenae had peeled back layers of time, exposing a community that had thrived during the Aegaen Bronze Age. Mycenae was clearly a high civilization, with beautiful art and impressive architecture. Yet it seemed to have no writing. “Such a conclusion,” Evans flatly declared, “I could not bring myself to accept.”

  Who were the Mycenaeans and where had they come from? What language did they speak? The gold and jewels Schliemann unearthed could hint at the Mycenaean way of life, but in the end they were mute testaments. Without written records, Evans knew, it would be impossible to learn much more. “The discoveries of Schliemann revealed so high a type of civilisation in the prehistoric Aegean, that if writing had proved to be unknown it would have been its absence which would have called for explanation,” he later wrote. Evans resolved to go in search of it, though he would not be able to turn his full attention to the quest till the end of the century.

  In Oxford, meanwhile, Evans was occupied with transforming the Ashmolean from a haphazard cabinet of curiosities into a world-class museum of art, archaeology, and antiquities. The keepership allowed for frequent travel, and he spent much time abroad, scouring Europe for artifacts to add to the collection. He was also busy orchestrating a suitable home for himself and Margaret. Evans had bought sixty acres on a hill outside Oxford, with commanding views of the countryside; it was a place he had loved in his student days. There he would build his house, which he named Youlbury, “from the ancient name of the heath below,” as Horwitz wrote.

  For Evans, there was a sense of urgency about the project: In 1890, Margaret had been diagnosed with tuberculosis, and he hoped Youlbury’s clean Oxfordshire air would restore her to health. But she did not live to see it finished. In March 1893, Margaret Evans died after fifteen years of marriage, leaving Arthur a widower at forty-one. “For the rest of his life he wrote on black-edged paper,” Horwitz wrote. “Even his scribbled notes were bordered in black.” Youlbury, a sprawling Victorian behemoth, was completed the next year, and Evans moved into it alone.

  Even before Margaret’s death, Evans had begun to explore the idea that writing was used in the Mycenaean world. In February 1893, just weeks before she died, he returned to Athens, where he picked over small, dusty treasures in antiquities shops. What he found there would eventually lead him to Knossos: small, prism-shaped stones of three and four sides, often of semiprecious material like red or green jasper, carnelian, or amethyst, pierced for wearing. Each face of the stone was engraved, Evans wrote, with “a series of remarkable symbols.” These symbols—ornate hieroglyphic pictures of people, animals, and objects—were, as he observed, “not a mere copy of Egyptian forms.”

  Cretan stones with hieroglyphic engravings, acquired by Arthur Evans

  Arthur J. Evans, Scripta Minoa

  The stones he had come upon are called seal-stones. Designed to make an impression in soft clay or wax, they were a means of marking ownership in prehistoric times. They reminded Evans of something Schliemann had shown him: the small, beadlike gems unearthed at Mycenae, also pierced and engraved with tiny stylized symbols. (Schliemann’s bead gems, however, were strictly ornamental.)

  In Athens, Evans bought as many seal-stones and engraved gems as he could find. With each purchase, he asked the dealer where the stones were from. The answer was nearly always the same: They had come from Crete. “To Crete,” Evans wrote, “I accordingly turned.”

  TO MODERN OBSERVERS, Crete seems merely a seaborne extension of Greece; in fact, it did not become part of the Greek state until 1913. The largest of the Greek islands, it lies almost equidistant between Europe, Asia, and North Africa, for centuries a handy stopping point for Mediterranean seafarers. As archaeologists of Evans’s time were already aware, Crete’s earliest known inhabitants were unrelated to the Greeks who would later people the mainland. “It was clearly recognized by the Greeks themselves,” Evans wrote, “that the original inhabitants of Crete were ‘barbarian’ or un-Greek.”

  In the centuries to come, Crete was repeatedly settled, invaded, colonized, traded with, resettled, reinvaded, and recolonized. By 1900, when Evans began digging there, the island was a web of ethnic, linguistic, and cultural influences stretching back thousands o
f years.

  Evans paid his first visit to Crete in March 1894. The island was then part of the Ottoman Empire, and within days of his arrival, he was plunged unwittingly into the hostilities between Greek Christians and Turkish Muslims there. As he wrote in his journal on March 17:

  In the evening some excitement. Knowing the straight road, I walked back at 9.45 in clear moonlight from the chief café to the inn. Hardly in my room, than three Christians burst in to the inn to say that two Turks had followed me to assassinate me, and would have stabbed me if they had not come after them. . . . People seem excited about it, but what is certain is that I was not.

  In the following days, as he roamed the island’s rocky country by foot and mule, Evans came upon seal-stones and engraved gems like those he had bought in Athens, carved with the same curious symbols. Many were owned by Cretan peasant women, who prized them as amulets. Known locally as galopetras (“milk stones”), they were worn by nursing mothers, who believed they ensured a plentiful supply of breast milk. Evans bought as many of the stones as he could; if a young mother refused to sell her charm, he could often persuade her to let him make a rubbing of it.

  The engravings on the stones, Evans quickly came to believe, were no mere decorations. They were too stylized for that, and too systematic. The carved symbols often occurred in clearly defined groups, and the same symbols might recur again and again on different stones. The carvings clearly signified something very particular to the Bronze Age people who had made them. “It is impossible to believe that the signs on these stones were simply idle figures carved at random,” he wrote in 1894. “Had there not been an object in grouping several signs together it would have been far simpler for the designer to have chosen single figures or continuous ornament to fill the space at his disposal.”

  Evans knew that he had come upon a system of written communication, used long before the Phoenicians invented the alphabet in the eleventh century B.C. and longer still before the alphabet made its way to Greece at the end of the ninth. It was a written record of the sort Schliemann had expected to find at Mycenae. And now Evans had found it elsewhere in the Aegean, dating to Mycenaean times. The Cretan stones, he later wrote, offered clear evidence “that the great days of the island lay beyond history.”

  By the end of 1893, before he had even set foot on Crete, Evans had felt sure enough of the markings on his Athenian seal-stones to announce his discovery in public, declaring to a London audience that he possessed “a clue to the existence of a system of picture-writing in the Greek lands.” In 1894, after he returned from the island, he published his first significant article about the engraved Cretan stones. In it, he argued that “an elaborate system of writing did exist within the limits of the Mycenaean world.”

  Evans identified two types of Cretan writing. On some stones, the carvings were clearly hieroglyphic, teeming with pictograms of people, plants, and animals. On others, the symbols were “linear and quasi-alphabetic,” as if the hieroglyphs had been reduced to their clean, bare outlines in “a kind of linear shorthand.” “Of this linear system too,” he wrote prophetically in 1894, “we have as yet probably little more than a fragment before us.” What was needed, Evans knew, was a full-scale excavation on Cretan soil. Over the next few years, he paid repeated visits to the island, eventually choosing Knossos as the place to dig.

  It was no random selection. Tradition held that Knossos had been the chief city of Cretan antiquity, the fabled seat of Minos’s empire. “Broad Knossos,” Homer had called it in the Iliad. In the Odyssey, he sang:

  One of the great islands of the world

  in midsea, in the winedark sea, is Krete:

  spacious and rich and populous, with ninety

  cities and a mingling of tongues. . . .

  And one among their ninety towns is Knossos.

  Here lived King Minos whom great Zeus received

  every ninth year in private council.

  By Evans’s day, archaeologists had already unearthed significant finds on the island. At the time, the part of Crete where Knossos was thought to have stood was known locally as Kephala. (The name was a shortened form of the half-Greek, half-Turkish phrase tou Tseleve he Kephala, “squire’s Knoll.”) In 1878, a Greek linguist with the historically evocative name of Minos Kalokairinos brought twenty workmen to Kephala and started digging. He found the remains of a vast building made of gypsum blocks, whose rooms were filled with huge ceramic jars.

  Three weeks into the dig, the Cretan Assembly ordered Kalokairinos to stop work. As MacGillivray wrote, “The reasoning, which Kalokairinos accepted, was that he might begin to reveal the sort of enviable artifacts that would almost certainly be removed from Crete to Constantinople.” Word of the discovery did get around in archaeological circles, and modern historians often credit Kalokairinos as the first true discoverer of the Palace of Minos. In the early 1880s, William James Stillman, a former American consul on Crete, examined a wall that Kalokairinos had exposed before the dig was halted and noticed the curious “masons’ marks” carved into the stone.

  Schliemann, too, had his eye on Kephala. Starting in 1883, he determined to excavate the Palace of Minos himself: It would be the final triumph, he hoped, of his storied career. Kephala was owned by an extended Turkish family, and though Schliemann tried to secure permission to dig there, he was unable to do so before he died in 1890. Schliemann’s death left the way open for Evans. “Nor can I pretend to be sorry that he did not dig at Knossos,” Evans would write years later.

  Besides the seal-stones and engraved gems he had already secured on Crete, Evans had encountered something even more exciting. In 1895, a local man showed him something he had found on the ground at Kephala: a “slip” of burned clay, about the size and shape of a slip of paper, incised with linear signs that “seemed to belong to an advanced system of writing,” as Evans said. He added, decisively: “On the hill of Kephala . . . I resolved to dig”

  Needing digging rights, Evans did what any self-assured Victorian of means would do: He simply bought the property. But the process turned out not to be so simple, even for a man of his wealth and determination. Schliemann had made two fortunes, first by starting a bank in Sacramento amid the California Gold Rush and later by cornering the European indigo market, yet even he had had no luck on Crete.

  In 1894, after much negotiation with Kephala’s owners, “native Mahometans, to whose almost inexhaustible powers of obstruction I can pay the highest tribute,” Evans managed to buy a quarter-share of the property for 235 British pounds. This gave him the right to force the sale of the remaining three-quarters. But over the next few years, a bloody insurrection on the island, in which the Greek Cretans tried to rout their Turkish oppressors, made further negotiation impossible. As he had done in the Balkans, Evans threw his support behind the local people in their fight to break free of the Ottoman Empire.

  Though he could not yet begin to dig, Evans was certain of the deep importance of what he had already found on Crete. The seal-stones and engraved gems he had obtained from the island’s peasant women were, he wrote in 1897, “striking corroboration” that “long before our first records of the Phoenician alphabet, the art of writing was known to the Cretans.”

  The insurrection raged on for several years before the Greeks prevailed; the last of the Turkish forces left the island in late 1899. The next year, “after encountering every kind of obstacle and intrigue,” Evans bought the rest of Kephala for 675 pounds. After extensive preparations in England—he equipped himself with a gross of nail brushes, two dozen tins of ox tongue, twenty tins of sardines, twelve plum puddings, a case of Eno’s Fruit Salt (a stomach remedy), a Union Jack, and a fleet of iron wheelbarrows, among other things—he landed on Crete in early March 1900. There he set about disinfecting and whitewashing the rented house in which he and his assistants would live.

  On March 23, with the Union Jack flying imperially overhead, Evans broke ground at Kephala. Excavating the site and restoring it to its form
er glory would occupy him till the end of his life.

  KEPHALA HAD BEEN inhabited as far back as the Stone Age. Digging deeply, Evans found stone implements and crude artifacts that dated to Neolithic times, about 6100 B.C. But it was the Bronze Age he was after, in particular the span from about 1850 to 1450 B.C., when the Palace of Minos had flourished.

  Though the palace’s outer walls were made of great stone blocks, its infrastructure was wood, an engineering safety measure in an earthquake-prone region. As layer upon layer of charred timber revealed, the palace had been ravaged, burned, and rebuilt several times over the centuries. The cause of these repeated destructions could only be guessed at: Any one of them could have resulted from an earthquake, a lightning strike, or a sacking at the hands of an invading enemy. What was clear was that at the start of the fourteenth century B.C., in some final catastrophe, the palace was sacked and burned one last time. It was rebuilt and partly reoccupied, but Knossos would never again be a seat of power.

  Under Evans’s direction, years of excavation would reveal a building larger than Buckingham Palace, spread over six acres. Like the ruins of Mycenae, the Palace of Minos could be dated with reference to Egyptian trade goods: In one of the site’s deeper layers, Evans’s workmen turned up a small Egyptian statue, carved of diorite and known to date from about 2000 B.C.

  The palace comprised hundreds of rooms and what had been multiple stories, grand staircases, vast halls, storerooms, and artisans’ workshops. Evans’s men uncovered the remains of a sophisticated hydraulic system that had included terra-cotta pipes, bubbling fountains, bathtubs, and even toilets that could be flushed with water. By the end of the 1900 season, which lasted nine weeks, the initial group of 30 workmen had grown to about 180. (In the interest of promoting harmony on the island in the wake of the insurrection, Evans employed both Christian and Muslim workers.) The men dug and lifted and hauled; nearby, the women sifted the loose soil for tiny treasures, like beads and plaster fragments, which they carefully washed.