In Search of the Trojan War (15 page)

The crux came in 1893 (a tragic year for Evans, for his wife died). In the spring of that year, searching among the trays of the antiquity dealers in the Athens flea market, he came across a number of tiny three- and four-sided stones engraved with what appeared to be an unknown system of writing. Evans had seen similar stones in Oxford: now he was told they came from Crete. At that time, the idea that a hieroglyphic system of writing could have existed in any part of prehistoric Europe seemed far-fetched, but this appears to have been what impelled Evans in spring 1894 to go to Crete, where he met Kalokairinos, saw the site at Knossos, and was shown the single Linear B tablet preserved from debris at the magazines. That decided him: ‘The great days of Crete were those of which we still find a reflection in the Homeric poems – the period of Mycenaean culture, to which here at least we would fain attach the name Minoan,’ he wrote, before he had even set spade to soil at Knossos. ‘The golden age of Crete lies far back beyond the limits of the historical period [i.e. Greece and Rome]; its culture … is practically identical with that of the Peloponnese and a large part of the Aegean world.’

On 23 March 1900 the excavation started in the area where Kalokairinos had dug twenty years before. By an extraordinary accident the building had been left virtually untouched since the day over three millennia before when it had been consumed by
fire – only a few inches below the grass, parts of walls appeared with frescoes still adhering to them. The chamber laid bare had red-painted walls up to 7 feet high, surrounded by gypsum benches with some sort of sunken tank on one side, and on the other – incredibly – a gypsum throne still in position, undamaged but bearing on its back the marks of the fire which finally destroyed the palace. Scattered on the floor were beautiful alabaster ritual containers which Evans thought the last king of Knossos had been using in a desperate rite of propitiation before the final blow fell. The finds were truly sensational, but it was their great antiquity which immediately made Knossos the focus of Aegean archaeology, for here was a high civilisation which went back into the fourth millennium BC, far beyond anything known from the mainland. As early as 27 March 1900 Evans could write in his diary:

The extraordinary phenomenon – nothing Greek – nothing Roman – perhaps one single fragment of late black varnished ware among tens of thousands. Even Geometrical pottery [seventh century BC] fails us – though … a flourishing Knossos existed lower down [the valley] … nay, its great period goes well back to the pre-Mycenaean period.

Evans had in fact discovered a hitherto unknown civilisation.

THE DIG OF 1900 AT KNOSSOS

It is worth spending little time over Evans’ excavation at Knossos, for it was one of the most famous and significant digs in archaeology; on it still rests our whole view of the structure and chronology of the Aegean Bronze Age. It is also worthwhile because hundreds of thousands of tourists visit the site every year and they are not always well served by either the guides to the site or the books available to tourists. Additional difficulty is caused by Evans’ reconstructions, which have destroyed or masked many key features. To be fair to Evans, he was
immediately faced with conservation problems: as can be seen from the 1900 photograph, the throne-room with its damaged frescoes was far too delicate to leave unprotected – it suffered rain damage that first winter, in fact – and Evans roofed it over in 1901. Similarly it was entirely justifiable to support and restore the many-storeyed Grand Staircase, all of whose architectural elements were found burnt and fallen in on themselves below ground level – surely anyone who has experienced the thrill of walking down those stairs into the truly labyrinthine lower corridors of the palace will be grateful to Evans for giving that opportunity; nor can there be any doubt about the basic correctness of the restoration: the Grand Staircase definitely was there. But Evans went far beyond this. Although the palace nowhere survived above head height at the level of the central court, he gradually came to want to restore many parts of the palace to show what it might have looked like. This work was mainly done between 1922 and 1930, in which year the throne-room complex reached its present state.

A first point: in the 1900 dig, in which Evans uncovered the main part of the west wing where Kalokairinos had dug, he was on site for nine weeks and his workforce numbered anything from fifty to 180 men. In that time 2 acres were uncovered. It is fair to say that such a complex site would take years today, so Evans’ technique, for all his undoubted skill and his wonderful eye for detail, is nearer to that of Schliemann than to that of our own day. Also, though Evans had been interested in archaeology since his youth, this was his first proper excavation, at the age of forty-nine, and he was never to excavate a mainland site. The main work took place over the first four seasons, so it is important to establish what Evans thought he had found
at the time
, for, as is the practice in archaeology, most of the millions of sherds found at Knossos were thrown away; only a sample, about 1 per cent (but that is still scores of baskets!), were retained. Archaeology then, in destruction.

Fortunately the main elements were recorded at the time in the day books of Evans’ assistant Mackenzie, which, along with
Evans’ notebooks, photographs (some of which appear in this book) and architects’ plans, are kept in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, where the interested reader who cannot get to Knossos can see the best Cretan collection outside Greece. Out of this raw material Evans constructed his annual reports, published by the British School of Athens from 1900 onwards, and this record was brought together in the
Palace of Minos
. But Evans was an old man when he wrote the later volumes of this great work, and it is best to go back to the annual reports to see what they made of it actually at the time.

Evans’ report for 1900 shows that he agreed with Schliemann and Dörpfeld about Knossos. His first impressions are of a ‘Mycenaean’ palace just like that at Tiryns. He makes several stylistic parallels with Tiryns: the bathroom adjoining the ‘Central Clay Area’ in the west wing was like that at Tiryns, for instance; the brown and green reliefs with carved rosettes from the southern entrance he compared with marble decoration found by Elgin and Schliemann at Mycenae; the latest changes in the layout of the palace he attributed to the work of Mycenaean overlords, for this final phase was full of ‘pottery of the mature Mycenaean class, analogous to that found at Mycenae, Ialysus [Rhodes] and Tell el Amarna [in Egypt]’. The Egyptian parallels, which included enamelled roundels which had been fixed to the throne-room ceiling, suggested to Evans a thirteenth-century-BC date for the throne-room, which was from the ‘latest phase of the palace’; by then, Evans thought, ‘the Mycenaean Lords of Knossos had achieved the conquest of the Eteocretan population’; on the whole, he argued, ‘it is difficult to bring down the period of the destruction of the Palace later than the thirteenth century BC’.

The interpretation, then, could hardly be clearer. Evans thought he had found a great and ancient Minoan culture which in its last stage of existence, in the fourteenth to thirteenth centuries BC, had been conquered and occupied by mainland Mycenaeans who had refurbished the place, decorating it with mainland palace-style designs, filling it with Mycenaean pottery
and even inserting within it a Mycenaean throne-room. There had even been, it appears, a mainland megaron or royal hall, which Evans initially termed a ‘Pelasgian megaron’ but later deemed (almost certainly wrongly) to be a classical intrusion – its foundations were subsequently demolished and used in one of his more fanciful reconstructions. Evans’ interpretation was thus entirely consistent with the analysis of the pottery found by Kalokairinos which had been examined and published by Fabricius, Haussoullier, Furtwängler and Löschke, as well as commented on by Schliemann and Dörpfeld. All these experts agreed on the style and approximate date of this pottery, and as illustrations of it were published we can be sure they (and Evans) were right: the palace was indeed occupied by a Greek dynast in the thirteenth century BC, just as Homeric tradition had it: the Achaian Idomeneus could indeed have taken an army from his palace around the traditional date of the Trojan War.

However, Evans soon abandoned his initial impressions. He announced a new theory of the relationship between Crete and the mainland as early as his 1901 report. (The main work on the palace was over by 1905, though further explorations were done before the First World War, and in the early 1920s. The last year of large-scale work at Knossos was 1930.)

The new theory Evans had evolved was as follows. It appears in his
Palace of Minos
, published in four massive volumes between 1921 and 1936, one of the greatest works of archaeological scholarship ever written, unrivalled in its astonishing reach, its grasp of parallel evidence in other civilisations. If my account appears to be overcritical of Evans, it is only because, in the area of his work which is relevant to our search – the problem of the last palace of Knossos – a growing body of evidence suggests that Evans got it completely wrong in his final version. It should be pointed out, though, that many experts still agree with much of Evans’ analysis, and the interested reader who wishes to look further into this fascinating but treacherous material is recommended to consult the appropriate part of the bibliography
here
.

Evans found that the hill of Knossos had been inhabited since Neolithic times, and that a sophisticated palace civilisation had existed from 1900 or 1800 BC with not one but two forms of writing, both unknown. This civilisation had evidently dominated the Cyclades and much of the rest of the Aegean world until the burning of Knossos, which Evans dated to around 1420 BC. This ‘Minoan’ empire must have had a powerful fleet, both naval and mercantile, for Knossos differed conspicuously from the known mainland sites in having no fortifications whatsoever; clearly, thought Evans, there had been a kind of
Pax Minoica
imparting peace to the whole region. Such archaeological evidence therefore seemed to corroborate the outline of Thucydides’ account of Greek prehistory which we have already seen regarding the Trojan story:

The first person known to us by tradition as having established a navy is Minos. He made himself master of what is now called the Hellenic sea, and ruled over the Cyclades, into most of which he sent the first colonies … and he did his best to put down piracy in those waters, a necessary step to secure the revenues for his own use.

The Minos legends inevitably made a great impression on Evans, and he soon asserted that the Mycenaean civilisation found by Schliemann at Mycenae and Tiryns was merely a barbarian offshoot, colonised and ‘civilised’ by Minoans, employing Minoan artists and craftsmen (as for instance in the masterpieces of the shaft graves and the friezes of the Treasury of Atreus). In his presidential address to the Hellenic Society in 1912 Evans expressed his certainty in the ‘absolute continuity’ of Minoan and Mycenaean civilisation, a unity which on the mainland and in Crete ‘imposes the conclusion that there was continuity of race’. He was equally sure that this world was not Greek, though he was prepared to admit that Greek speakers may already have been present in Greece before the ‘Dorian invasion’ at the end of the Bronze Age, as a kind of submerged lower class. Homer’s heroic world he thought definitely post-Mycenaean: ‘Homer, though
professedly commemorating the deeds of Achaian heroes, is able to picture them among surroundings which, in view of the
absolute continuity
of Minoan and Mycenaean history we may
definitely set down as non-Hellenic
.’ (My italics.) In other words the Homeric poems, though written in Greek, were, according to Evans, merely pale reflections of the great non-Greek Minoan–Mycenaean culture. The Trojan War itself was nothing more than a revamped Cretan myth. It is remarkable that Evans was so dogmatic about this matter when he had 2000 Linear B tablets in his own possession,
untranslated
: ‘If the inhabitants of the latest palace structures are to be regarded as “Achaians” the Greek occupation of Crete must, on this showing, be carried back to Neolithic times.’ The very idea of it! Evans was asserting here that there was no sign in the archaeology of Knossos which could indicate the arrival of a new race, the Mycenaeans, despite his clear initial impression precisely to this effect! It is a mark of Evans’ sway, the grand, proprietorial manner with which until his death in 1941 he controlled the interpretation of his finds at Knossos (which, after all, he owned!) that he was able to push through ideas which many competent authorities saw as more than questionable. The premise of continuity of race and culture was particularly dubious: ‘
I
do not presume to dispute it,’ wrote Walter Leaf in 1915, but ‘many good authorities believe that they can detect a wholly new influence entering with LM III [i.e. after 1400].’ And of course they were right: as Evans had originally thought, the destruction shortly before 1400 BC heralded the arrival of conquerors from mainland Greece who smashed the society of Minoan Crete and imposed on it their own militarist bureaucracy (see
Chapter 5
); this is now generally accepted. An even more revolutionary rewrite of Evans’ thesis would return us to the state of affairs as Evans saw it in 1900: Greek rule at Knossos lasting until a final destruction around 1200 BC or a little later. The last palace at Knossos was, after all, Greek; its art and its Linear B archive characteristic of the Mycenaean world of the thirteenth century BC.

WHY DID EVANS COME TO THE CONCLUSIONS HE DID?

In the evolution of modern thought about the Bronze-Age Aegean there have been two crucial stages. The pioneering work of Schliemann, driven by his passionate faith in the truth of Homer, engendered a state of mind which tended to consider all relics of this Mycenaean culture as illustrating Homer’s poetry, and Homer as reflecting an actual heroic world. Arthur Evans’ epoch-making discoveries at Knossos, however, and the reconstitution of the earlier Minoan civilisation, put Schliemann’s finds in an entirely new perspective. The state of mind which grew out of the tremendous (not to say dogmatic) grasp of ideas with which Evans publicised his finds has been equally pervasive – namely the unswerving conviction that every cultural manifestation on the mainland was introduced, if not actually made, by Minoans who had conquered and colonised Greece and imposed on it their own civilisation. In short Evans was to assert that the world of Homer never existed except as a distant reflection of a Minoan world. These two mental attitudes, the Schliemann and Evans schools, have dominated the field of research, even when both were proved in part misguided.