Arthur Evans

• 1. Introduction

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  Arthur Evans knelt in a flower-covered hill on the Greek island of Crete in March 1900, and within a few months he had uncovered one of the most complex structures the ancient world had ever produced. The site at Knossos contained more than a thousand interlocking rooms. It would take Evans the rest of a very long life to make sense of what he found there. He was born on the 8th of July 1851, and died on the 11th of July 1941, ninety years and three days later. In between he was a spy, a prisoner, a war correspondent, a museum keeper, and finally the man who named the Minoan civilisation. What drove a myopic English scholar with a walking cane into the most politically dangerous corners of the nineteenth-century world? And how did those years of chaos and grief eventually lead him to the labyrinth?

• 2. A Family of Collectors

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  John Evans, Arthur's father, had started work in a paper mill owned by his maternal uncle, John Dickinson, in 1840. Profits from that business would eventually fund Arthur's digs, restorations, and publications at Knossos. The family was not pretentious. They lived near the mill in a brick terraced house the neighbours called the "red house" because it lacked the sooty patina of the surrounding buildings. Arthur's grandmother called the boy "darling Trot" and noted, affectionately, that compared to his father he was "a bit of a dunce."

  Arthur's mother, Harriet, died after childbirth in 1858 when Arthur was seven. He had two brothers, Lewis and Philip Norman, and two sisters, Harriet and Alice. His father remarried twice. The third wife, Maria Millington Lathbury, was a classical scholar, and when John Evans was seventy the couple had a daughter, Joan, who became an art historian. John Evans himself lived to 85, dying in 1908.

• 3. Education and Early Adventure

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  At Harrow School, which Evans entered in 1865 at fourteen, his eyesight was too poor to see clearly beyond a short distance. He carried a cane he called Prodger to navigate his immediate surroundings. His wit proved equally sharp. He started a satirical periodical called The Pen-Viper, which the school administration shut down after its first issue. He was co-editor of The Harrovian in his final year, 1869-70, and competed for the Natural History Prize against his friend Francis Maitland Balfour; they tied.

  At Brasenose College, Oxford, where he matriculated on the 9th of June 1870, Evans read Modern History. His grasp of the subject's later centuries was patchy, to put it gently. During his finals he could answer no questions on topics after the twelfth century. It took the intervention of his examiner Edward Augustus Freeman, who shared Evans's Gladstone liberalism and his interest in the Herzegovina uprising of 1875-1877, to save him. Freeman persuaded Evans's tutors George Kitchen and John Richard Green, who in turn persuaded the Regius professor William Stubbs, that Evans's extraordinary knowledge of ancient history and cultural anthropology merited a first-class degree. Green wrote to Freeman in November 1875: "Little Evans , son of John Evans the great , has just come back from the Herzegovina which he reached by way of Lapland, having started from the Schools in excitement at the 'first' I wrung for him out of the obdurate Stubbs."

  The summers were more instructive than the terms. In June 1871, Evans and his brother Lewis visited Hallstatt, where their father had excavated in 1866. The following year they crossed into Ottoman territory in the Carpathians illegally at high altitudes with, as Evans recorded, "revolvers at the ready." He bought the clothes of a wealthy Turkish man there, complete with red fez and embroidered tunic, and published a detailed account in Fraser's Magazine in May 1873. A brief, unhappy semester at the University of Göttingen in 1875, recommended by the Harrow headmaster Henry Montagu Butler, ended when Evans abandoned his studies to lead what he called hasty excavations at Trier, crating artefacts against plunder and shipping them home to his father.

• 4. Balkans and Bosnia

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  The Herzegovina uprising of 1875-1877 was the hinge on which Arthur Evans's early career turned. He and Lewis planned in the summer of 1875 to observe conditions in the rebellious mountain village of Bobovo, in territory Evans identified as the strongest point of resistance in the triple mountain ranges of Ljubišnja and Tara gorges. Ottoman authorities expelled them from the Province of Pljevlja on the 15th of August 1875. They made their way to Dubrovnik via Pljevlja, a Roman-era city whose ancient municipal identity Evans was already cataloguing.

  The encounter with the Austro-Hungarian Empire was equally eventful. Lodging in Slavonski Brod rather than the Serbian town across the Sava River, the brothers were spotted by an officer who thought their sketches looked suspicious. When police invited them to produce their passports, Evans replied: "Tell him that we are Englishmen and are not accustomed to being treated in this way." The argument ended, as Evans later described it, with the chief inviting them to spend the night in a cell. On the way to the holding cell Evans harangued the crowd following them in German, threatened the authorities in the name of the British fleet, which he claimed would sail up the Sava River, and offered the jailer a bribe for food and water. They went in unfed. Dr Makanetz, leader of the National Party of the Croatian Assembly, happened to be in Brod and complained to the mayor. The brothers were released with apologies.

  Back in England, Evans wrote up the experience as Through Bosnia and Herzegovina, published in two editions in 1876 and 1877. Overnight he was an expert in Balkan affairs. The Manchester Guardian hired him as a correspondent and sent him back in 1877. He was treated by the Ottomans as though he were an ambassador, despite his explicitly anti-Turkish writing. Between dispatches he collected portable artefacts and seal stones and visited the family of his examiner Freeman in Sarajevo. In 1878 he proposed to Freeman's eldest daughter, Margaret, three years his senior. They married near the Freeman home in Wookey, Somerset, and moved to a Venetian villa Evans had purchased in Ragusa, which they called Casa San Lazzaro.

  Evans's journalism grew steadily more confrontational toward the Austro-Hungarian administration that had replaced Ottoman rule in Bosnia and Herzegovina. He wrote: "The people are treated not as a liberated but as a conquered and inferior race." He and Margaret took in an orphan and invited a blind woman to dinner every night. Then Evans published public letters calling for insurrection. In 1882 he was arrested and spent six weeks in prison awaiting trial. At the trial nothing definitive could be proved against him. His wife was interrogated, and she found most offensive the reading of her love letters aloud by a hostile police agent. Evans was expelled. Gladstone had been informed immediately but made no public move. The couple returned to Oxford, abandoning the Ragusa villa, which became a hotel.

• 5. The Ashmolean Years

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  In January 1884, the keeper of the Ashmolean Museum died, leaving it in a chaotic state. The museum had begun as a natural history institution. Its collections had been moved to other buildings. The upper floor was being used for university functions. Art collector Charles Drury Edward Fortnum had a vast collection but was dissatisfied with his other options, complaining that the South Kensington Museum lacked a "properly informed and competent person as keeper." Evans, aged 34, was appointed Keeper of the Ashmolean in 1884. He held a grand inauguration, published as The Ashmolean as a Home of Archaeology in Oxford, and immediately began steering it toward being a serious archaeology museum.

  He returned artefacts that had been transferred out, negotiated for Fortnum's collections, and eventually donated his father's collections and his own Minoan assemblages to the institution. A cemetery of the British Iron Age, discovered in 1886 at Aylesford in Kent, was excavated under his leadership and published in 1890. Evans concluded that the Aylesford site belonged to a culture related to the continental Belgae, a view still accepted today, though the dating has since been refined to the period after approximately 75 BC. Sir Barry Cunliffe called his analysis "an outstanding contribution to Iron Age studies" with "a masterly consideration of the metalwork" as recently as 2012.

  All the while, he was building connections that would reshape his life. In February 1893, while shopping flea markets in Athens with John Myres, a student at the British School, Evans purchased seal stones inscribed with a mysterious script said to have come from Crete. That purchase planted the seed. A few weeks later, on the 11th of March 1893, Evans's wife Margaret died in Alassio, Italy, after two hours of painful spasms, with Evans holding her hand. She was 45. He was 42. He had the epitaph on her grave in the English cemetery at Alassio read, in part: "Her bright, energetic spirit, undaunted by suffering to the last, and ever working for the welfare of those around her, made a short life long." He never married again. For the rest of his life he wrote on black-bordered stationery.

• 6. The Road to Knossos

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  After Margaret's death, Evans wandered the Ligurian coast examining Terramare Culture sites before returning to live in the cabin he had built for her on Boar's Hill, near Oxford. Then the mounting tension in Crete began to attract his attention. Knossos was known as a significant site thanks to Evans's old friend and fellow Bosnia correspondent William James Stillman. Another friend, the Italian archaeologist Federico Halbherr, future excavator of Phaistos, was sending him regular updates by mail.

  Ottoman administrators were practicing deliberate stalling. They required would-be excavators to purchase the site outright from its native owners first. The owners, coached to set prohibitive prices, had even driven off the wealthy Heinrich Schliemann, who abandoned his attempt in 1890 and died that year. Evans used a different strategy. He established the Cretan Exploration Fund, modelled on the Palestine Exploration Fund, on the theory that landowners who would not sell to individuals would sell to an institution. He bought one quarter of the site with first option on the rest, neglecting to mention he was the only contributor to the fund.

  In September 1898, the last Ottoman troops withdrew from Crete, and Evans was there to report it for the Manchester Guardian. Religious violence against the Muslim minority followed immediately. Evans reported on a massacre at a village he identified as Eteà, where Muslim civilians who had surrendered their weapons after being promised clemency were instead shot. His Manchester Guardian dispatch described the scene: "Men, women and children, they were all led forth to the church of St. Sophia, which lies on a hill about half an hour above the village, and then and there dispatched." The only survivor was a small girl whose life was saved when someone threw a cape over her. By 1899 a cross-confessional republican government had been established on Crete, and the Ottoman firman blocking excavation was no longer an obstacle.

• 7. Knossos and the Minoans

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  Evans hired two foremen and thirty-two diggers and began work at Knossos in March 1900. His chief assistant was Duncan Mackenzie, already distinguished for his excavations on the island of Melos. Within a few months the team had exposed a substantial portion of what Evans called the Palace of Minos. The structure covered roughly five acres and contained more than a thousand interlocking rooms, some of which served as artisans' workrooms, wine presses, storage areas, and religious and administrative spaces. Its maze-like quality reminded Evans of the labyrinth of Greek mythology, built by the legendary King Minos to hide the Minotaur. Evans named the civilisation that had once inhabited it the Minoan civilisation.

  By 1903, most of the palace had been excavated. Painted on the walls were numerous scenes of bulls. In 1905 Evans finished digging and commissioned restoration work, including repainting the room containing a throne-like stone chair. He hired a father-and-son team of Swiss artists, Émile Gilliéron père and fils. Critics later noted that some of the best-known frescoes in the throne room were largely the Gilliérons' inventions rather than faithful reconstructions.

  Among the finds were three thousand clay tablets. Evans transcribed and organised them, publishing the results as Scripta Minoa, beginning in 1901. He identified two distinct and mutually exclusive writing systems, which he named Linear A and Linear B. He dated the Linear B Chariot Tablets at Knossos to just before the catastrophic collapse of Minoan civilisation in the fifteenth century BC. He also argued in Scripta Minoa that most symbols in the Phoenician alphabet were nearly identical to the much older Cretan hieroglyphs of the nineteenth century BC. Linear B was eventually shown to be an early form of Greek, a discovery made after Evans's death. Linear A remains undeciphered.

• 8. Honours and Final Years

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  Evans was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1901, the same year he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Dublin and became one of the founding Fellows of the British Academy. He won the Lyell Medal in 1880 and the Copley Medal in 1936. In 1911, King George V knighted him for his services to archaeology.

  He resigned as Keeper of the Ashmolean in 1908 to concentrate on his Minoan publications. In 1912 he declined the presidency of the Society of Antiquaries, a position his father had already held. In 1914, at sixty-three, he accepted the presidency after all, which brought with it an ex officio appointment as a Trustee of the British Museum. During the First World War he fought the War Office's attempts to commandeer the museum for the Air Board.

  In 1913, Evans paid £100 to double the value of a studentship established in memory of Augustus Wollaston Franks, jointly by the University of London and the Society of Antiquaries. The studentship was won that year by Mortimer Wheeler. During the Great Depression he had Jarn Mound and its surrounding wild garden built on Boar's Hill to create work for local unemployed labourers. The garden, planted with species from around the world, is now held by the Oxford Preservation Trust.

  Evans died on the 11th of July 1941, three days after his ninetieth birthday. The government of Yugoslavia sent representatives to his funeral, a recognition of the role he had played in the Balkan uprisings of the 1870s and 1880s. He left part of his estate to the Boy Scouts, and Youlbury Camp on Boar's Hill remains available for their use today.