The Riddle of the Labyrinth (4 page)

On New Year's Day 1858, when Arthur was six and a half, Harriet Evans died after giving birth to her fifth child. Afterward, as Arthur's much younger half sister, Dame Joan Evans, recounted in her biography of him,
Time and Chance
, “John Evans wrote in his wife's diary that [the children] did not seem to feel her loss; more than seventy years later Arthur Evans was to write an indignant
NO
in the margin.” The next year, John Evans married a cousin, Fanny Phelps, who was by all accounts a loving stepmother to Harriet's children.

As a schoolboy at Harrow, Arthur won prizes in natural history, modern languages, and the writing of Greek epigrams. Entering Oxford, he studied history, graduating with first-class honors in 1874. As a twenty-year-old undergraduate, he published his first scholarly article, “On a Hoard of Coins Found at Oxford, with Some Remarks on the Coinage of the First Three Edwards.” It was his first public foray into the antiquarian circles of which his father was a leading light. (As a result of his early work, Arthur became known in those circles as “Little Evans, son of John Evans the Great,” a description that must surely have rankled.) After graduating from Oxford, Arthur studied briefly in Germany before striking out on the first of several long trips to the Balkans. The region interested him intensely, and he would live and work there for much of the next decade.

At the time, the Balkans were under the control of the Ottoman Empire, and the Slavic peoples of the region were eager to throw off its yoke. Evans became a staunch public champion of the Slavs' struggle for self-determination—a struggle that was often violent during the years he was there. In impassioned, unapologetically partisan prose, he filed a series of dispatches to the
Manchester Guardian
chronicling the heroism of the Slav resistance fighters. From his eventual base in Ragusa—the old Italian name for Dubrovnik, in what is now Croatia—Evans ranged over the remote corners of Serbia, Bosnia, and Herzegovina by foot, horseback, and steamer. He traversed the wild countryside to investigate reports of Turkish atrocities in remote villages, stripped off his clothes to ford icy rivers, and scaled cliffs to meet with fierce Turkish overlords in their mountaintop command posts. He was often uncomfortable, usually inconvenienced, and occasionally imprisoned. None of this seemed to bother him very much.

In 1876, when he was twenty-five, Evans published the first of his two books on the Balkans,
Through Bosnia and the Herzegóvina on Foot
, whose grandiloquent full title,
Through Bosnia and the Herzegóvina on Foot during the Insurrection, August and September 1875: With an Historical Review of Bosnia, and a Glimpse at the Croats, Slavonians, and the Ancient Republic of Ragusa
, left little doubt as to the sweep of his enterprise. The exploits he recounted gave one normally unflappable reader cause for concern. “Mind where you travel!” the intrepid British explorer Richard Burton wrote Evans in 1877, after reading his work.

In September 1878, Evans married Margaret Freeman. Small, plain, intelligent, and three years older than he, she was a daughter of Edward Augustus Freeman, a well-known historian now best remembered for his fiercely held views on Aryan racial supremacy. After their marriage, Evans brought Margaret to live in his beloved Ragusa, where they occupied a pleasant house by the sea in the old walled city. Evans had horrified his father by signing a twenty-year lease on the place.

He would not get to stay nearly so long. In 1882, with the region now controlled by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Evans was arrested for his political activities. Released by Austrian officials after seven weeks in a local jail, he was expelled from Ragusa. With Margaret, he returned to England. In 1884, Evans was appointed keeper of the Ashmolean, and the couple settled in Oxford.

By this time, Arthur Evans embodied the Victorian age writ large, or, more precisely, writ small. A diminutive man of barely five feet, Evans possessed all of his era's thirst for scientific inquiry, most of its grand passions, and many of its reflexive prejudices. Deeply curious about far-off lands and their people, he nonetheless bristled when Bosnian villagers addressed him as
brat
, “brother.” An ardent defender of the downtrodden, he could also write, as he did in
Through Bosnia and the Herzegóvina on Foot
: “I don't choose to be told by every barbarian I meet that he is a man and a brother. I believe in the existence of inferior races, and would like to see them exterminated.” (Evans tempered his verdict slightly in the next sentence, writing, “But . . . it is easy to see how valuable such a spirit of democracy may be amongst a people whose self-respect has been degraded by centuries of oppression.”)

Despite his small stature, Evans cut an imposing figure, always impeccably turned out in suit, tie, vest, and hat, and carrying a sturdy walking stick he had nicknamed Prodger. Prodger was not so much to lean on as to see by: From earliest childhood, Evans had been desperately nearsighted. As Joan Evans wrote: “His short sight, for which he refused to wear proper glasses, made him carry his head in a rather peering way. Moreover, he suffered from an extreme degree of night blindness, so that in the winter terms at Harrow he needed a friendly guide to steer him to or from afternoon school.”

But Evans's myopia, so constraining in other ways, proved a staggering advantage in his line of work. Unlike most people, he could see things with near-microscopic precision at extremely close range. When he was a boy, his stepmother, Fanny, wrote fondly of his peering at the face of an old coin “like a jackdaw down a marrow bone.”

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:

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.”

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.”