In Search of the Trojan War (14 page)

But Crete was also in classical times a repository of more ‘historical’ myths. One in particular, the myth of the lawgiver Minos, was believed to reflect real events. Homer mentions Minos and his just rule in Crete: he was later remembered as one of the great lawgivers in Hades. The historical tradition recorded by the fifth-century historian Thucydides was that Minos was the first person to establish a navy, that he dominated the Aegean and ruled the Cyclades

… in most of which he sent the first colonies, expelling the Carians and appointing his own sons as governors; and thus did his best to cut down piracy in those waters, a necessary step to secure the revenues for his own use. … As soon as Minos formed his navy, communication by sea became easier, and he colonised most of the islands.

It is with this period that Thucydides associates the building of the first walled cities in the Aegean world and, at a somewhat later stage, the expedition against Troy. Thucydides’ perceptive account represents the rational classical Greek’s interpretation of the many legends about Minos and his rule at Knossos (and interestingly it can now be paralleled by growing evidence of Minoan ‘colonies’ in the Cyclades, and on the coast of Asia Minor). According to Homer, it was Minos’ grandson Idomeneus who led eighty ships to Troy with Agamemnon of Mycenae, but we should probably take that genealogical relation as symbolic; the ancients distinguished two kings called Minos, one in the fifteenth and one in the thirteenth century BC, and if we wish to take Thucydides’ account at all seriously, it might be seen as
implying one Minos ruling a Cretan (‘Minoan’) empire in the Aegean in the fifteenth century, and a king of Knossos in the thirteenth, perhaps calling himself a descendant of Minos, who was part of the Mycenaean world at the time of the Trojan War.

Of the many other Cretan legends which involve Minos, only one need detain us: it is the most famous, popularised by Mary Renault in her novel
The King Must Die
. According to this story, Minos was so powerful that even the mainlanders paid him tribute: each year the Athenians sent him seven young noblemen and seven young women as a tribute to be given to the Minotaur (literally the ‘Bull of Minos’), a monstrous half-man half-bull which was kept in a labyrinth under the palace at Knossos. The story of how the young prince Theseus killed the Minotaur and was saved by his love for Minos’ daughter Ariadne (and by her thread) need not be retold here, but the labyrinth (a non-Greek word from the root
labrys
= ‘double axe’) was one of the most constant features of the Knossos myth in later centuries – it appears in the classical coinage of the city, and it was the labyrinth in particular which attracted travellers who alighted in Crete. In fact it seems that the modern mismeaning of the word labyrinth must have arisen at Knossos itself.

Crete remained a ‘famous island’ even to Anglo-Saxon travellers who used it as a stopping place going eastwards (Crete was only occupied for a century by the Arabs, and was taken back by the Byzantines in 962); they knew of the position of
Creto thaet igland
halfway to Africa, and of its size (
hit is an hund mila long
). (Orosius’
History
.) All these early travellers were fascinated by Minos and the labyrinth, but opinions differed as to where it had been. The first modern survey of the island, made by Cristoforo Buondelmonti who spent nearly eleven weeks travelling there in 1415, identified ancient mine workings in the hills behind Gortys as being the site of the labyrinth, and this story we find repeated right up to the nineteenth century, for instance by Lord Elgin’s associate Charles Cockerell. However the observant Spanish traveller Pero Tafur, whom we met at Troy, gives us a fascinating short description of Crete in 1435 in which
he places the labyrinth made by Daedalus at Knossos, outside Candia, ‘with many other antiquities’. Discerning travellers who knew their sources agreed. Richard Pococke published his account in
A Description of the East
in 1745, noting an ‘eminence to the south’ of the classical ruins of Knossos which may be the hill of Kefala where the palace stands. It was left to two nineteenth-century English travellers to put the map of early Crete on a firm footing, identifying most of the main sites with an accuracy which has not been challenged. The first was Richard Pashley, still only in his twenties when he spent seven months labouring over the Cretan mountains in 1834, and produced an illustrated account of his travels. When he reached and located Knossos, he thought that the tangle of ruins in the neighbourhood ‘calls to mind the well-known ancient legend respecting the Cretan labyrinth. … There is however no sufficient reason for believing that the Cretan labyrinth ever had a more real existence than its fabled occupant.’ The second observer was the naval surveyor Thomas Spratt. In 1865 he published
Travels in Crete
, which is still useful today. Spratt visited Knossos and rightly deduced that the legendary prehistoric palace was on the same site by the river Kairatos. At this time the area had been heavily quarried for building stone for Heraklion, and was still being plundered.

The memory of the site of Knossos had survived then, and the time would soon be ripe to see whether the legends about Minos contained a kernel of truth. Schliemann’s digs at Troy and then Mycenae in the early and mid-1870s had revolutionised the view of Aegean prehistory, indeed revealed a world no one believed had existed. They also inspired many Greeks to delve into their prehistory.

PRELUDE TO KNOSSOS

Today Knossos is one of the best-known tourist sites in the Aegean; with its rebuilt halls, courtyards and stairways it is a goal for all visitors to Crete, a place where, courtesy of Sir Arthur
Evans’ reconstructions, the modern visitor can momentarily enter a lost world which seems to combine innocence and sophistication. Evans is the great figure of the second stage of our search, and, as with Schliemann at Troy, the story of Knossos is inextricably bound up with Evans’ own ‘myth’.

No more than Schliemann at Troy was Evans the ‘discoverer’ of Knossos; he was not even the first excavator. In fact the specific site had been identified by the 1860s at the latest, and trial excavations were made there in December 1878 by the Heraklion merchant Minos Kalokairinos; his were the finds we saw with Schliemann and Dörpfeld in
Chapter 2
, and they were extensively commented on at the time – ‘the most important of all the digs made in Crete’, wrote the eminent German scholar Fabricius prior to Evans’ dig. Born in 1843, Kalokairinos came from a well-to-do Cretan family. He says he had first wanted to dig the site of Knossos in 1864, but was prevented from doing so by the revolt against the Turks in 1866 (unlike Greece, Crete was still under Turkish rule). His chance came in 1878, when he was probably inspired to try again by Schliemann’s success at Mycenae two years before, and impressed by the close similarity of vases dug up at Knossos to those found at Mycenae. Such pottery was already known, could be freely bought in Heraklion and had found its way into collections in Athens; it was no secret that it came from the Kefala hill at Knossos.

Kalokairinos made twelve trenches in the hill, each about 6 feet deep, and he immediately struck massive buildings. He realised he had a palatial complex about 60 yards by 45: in fact we now know that this was simply the west wing of the palace, the throne-room apartments. He hit the curved corner of the antechamber of the throne-room, exposing red painted walls; he uncovered part of the west front, which greets visitors today as they come from the entrance kiosk (here could be seen evidence of the fire which finally destroyed the palace); he also cleared the third magazine of its twelve pithoi (storage jars) which still contained peas, barley and broad beans. In the debris in the corridor outside the magazine he may have found the Linear B
tablet seen by Evans in Heraklion in 1894, the first known in modern times. So Kalokairinos made quite an extensive trial dig and he took sample pottery throughout the west wing of the palace, including stirrup jars, amphorae and jugs, possibly of the thirteenth century BC, as well as ‘champagne glasses’ (kylices) and decorated one-handled cups certainly of a thirteenth-century date – in other words of the same period as Schliemann’s finds at Tiryns.

The success of this trial dig was Kalokairinos’ undoing. In February 1879 the native Cretan parliament refused him permission to dig further, for fear that the finds might be expatriated by the Turks to the Imperial Museum in Istanbul. Nevertheless the finds were widely reported and created great scholarly interest. Kalokairinos sent pithoi to London, Paris and Rome, hoping to interest archaeologists and institutions in the site (the pithos he gave to the British Museum can still be seen, in the corridor to the Mycenaean room). Among those he showed round the site were Schliemann and Dörpfeld, the American consul Stillman, and the Englishman Arthur Evans who had been intrigued by Schliemann’s finds on the mainland. All were agreed that this was a palace remarkably like that at Tiryns – the pottery, as the Frenchman Haussoullier said, was ‘so similar to finds at Mycenae, Rhodes and Spáta [in Attica]’.

When Evans examined Kalokairinos’ collection at his home in March 1894 he swiftly formulated plans to excavate the palace: he said he hoped to be the preferred candidate for permission to dig the site, and in that year he bought a quarter of it, ‘where the Palace of Minos stands which I found’, notes Kalokairinos in his diary. In 1898 Evans came back again, a few days before the burnings and fighting in Heraklion which preceded the liberation. They went out together to the site where ‘I showed him the double axehead engraved on the stones, and the axes on the upper part of the labyrinth.’ Unfortunately Kalokairinos’ collection was destroyed when his house was burned down in the fighting against the Turks, and his excavation notes went with it (rebuilt in 1903, the house, which is near the
old harbour, is now the Local History Museum of Crete). After the liberation Evans was able to buy the rest of the site of Knossos, where he started excavation in 1900. Evans’ dramatic finds gave Kalokairinos much joy, being a loyal Cretan: ‘These new discoveries will make the Heraklion Museum richer and worthy of admiration: people from all over Europe and America are coming to visit the palace and see the artefacts.’

We should be grateful that Evans and not Kalokairinos was able to dig the site, for the Cretan was not a professional excavator: his was a messy dig as far as Evans was concerned (he says so in one of his grudging references to his predecessor in his book
The Palace of Minos
). But it is pleasing that a Cretan played his part in the search. There is a touching endpiece to the story. In 1902, by which time Evans’ fame was worldwide, Kalokairinos was fifty-nine, his business had collapsed, and he turned again to the law, in which he had taken a degree as a young man. His thesis was entitled ‘The legal system of King Minos and its influence on Roman legislators’!

Ironically our comparatively meagre record of Kalokairinos’ dig is now proving of value to historians attempting to recover a picture of the palace as it was when Evans found it, because, for good or ill, Evans was to change the site at Knossos permanently and irreparably. Indeed it is unlikely now that firm agreement will ever be reached on the nature of the last palace of Knossos, the palace from which, if the Homeric catalogue of ships is correct, King Idomeneus sailed with eighty vessels to help Agamemnon of Mycenae sack Troy.

ARTHUR EVANS

Evans was born in 1851, at which time Schliemann was on the way to making his first fortune in California, buying gold-dust from prospectors. The background of the two men could hardly have been more different. Evans was Oxford-educated; his father, John, was a well-known antiquary and collector, treasurer of the Royal Society, and one of that group of men we have already
met, Sir John Lubbock among them, who established the new studies of anthropology and prehistory on a scientific basis in Britain. Evans was brought up steeped in antiquities, and he had a brilliant eye for their tiniest detail. Tough, obstinate and determined to the point of dogmatism, Evans was also an exceptionally good field researcher – like Schliemann in this respect – who loved to travel, especially when roughing it, and who from his late teens until well into middle age liked to make long journeys on foot or horseback into difficult and primitive country: his minute examinations of the local terrain in eastern and central Crete remain the basis of all modern topographical study.

After a holiday in the Balkans when he was twenty years old, he developed a particular interest in Bosnia, then under Turkish rule. He was in Sarajevo during the 1875 rising and produced a book, which Gladstone quoted in Parliament, on the subject of Turkish atrocities. In 1877 Evans was appointed special correspondent to the
Manchester Guardian
by the editor, C.P. Scott, and in the next few years Evans lived a cloak-and-dagger life of extraordinary adventure and risk, a career which in most people’s eyes would have been quite enough for one lifetime (his dispatches were later published as
Letters to the Manchester Guardian
).

But in all this Evans maintained his interest in archaeology and antiquities; he was able, for instance, to be in England to see the Kensington exhibition of Schliemann’s treasures from Troy in 1878, and was electrified by what he saw. In 1883, shortly before he became keeper of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, he went to Greece, saw Mycenae and Tiryns, and visited Schliemann in Athens. There he spent some hours examining the treasure from Mycenae. Their conversation, unfortunately, is unrecorded. That Evans was already of the opinion that Mycenaean civilisation originated in Crete seems unlikely, but the idea was not a new one; Schliemann had already been to Knossos, and Virchow and Müller, as we have seen, would soon be urging Schliemann to look to Crete for the source of the civilisation of
the shaft graves.
Ex oriente lux
had long been the guiding dictum of continental scholarship: in other words, the characteristic features of western and Greek civilisation came as ‘light from the east’, from Egypt and Mesopotamia, incomparably older and richer cultures. Schliemann and his followers were following this in assuming that Mycenae and Tiryns were built by Phoenicians, that the Greeks only arrived in the ‘Dark Age’ after the collapse of Mycenaean civilisation. But there was a growing reaction to this viewpoint which contended that the west had always shown a measure of creativity and originality of its own (Reinach’s book on this,
The Oriental Mirage
of 1893, made a particular impression on Evans).