The Riddle of the Labyrinth (5 page)

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 of 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 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:

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 former 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.

In the course of the season, Evans's workers unearthed an exquisite alabaster vase shaped like a triton shell; the high alabaster throne; pieces of many different frescoes, which Evans would arrange to have painstakingly restored; statuary; painted pottery; and the charred remains of graceful wooden columns that, like those at Mycenae, were smooth, round, and downward-tapering, wider at the top than at the bottom. So delighted was Sir John with his son's discoveries that he sent him 500 British pounds.

But all this, as Evans's assistant John Linton Myres would write, was “almost thrown into the shade” by the discovery that season of the inscribed clay tablets, “a discovery which carries back the existence of written documents in the Hellenic lands some seven centuries beyond the first known monuments of the historic Greek writing.”

On March 30, workmen lifted from the soil of Knossos “a kind of baked clay bar, rather like a stone chisel in shape, though broken at one end, with script on it and what appear to be numerals,” as Evans later wrote. He saw immediately that the linear script on the bar resembled that of the clay “slip” he had been shown in 1895. The slip had been destroyed not long afterward, a casualty of the Cretan insurrection, but Evans had had the foresight to make a copy of it.

The discovery of writing at Knossos was, Evans later wrote, “the dramatic fulfillment of my most sanguine expectations.” In the weeks that followed, his workmen unearthed more and more tablets, many badly broken but some completely intact. At times, they came upon entire small chambers filled with tablets, the archival record rooms of the Palace of Minos. On April 5, 1900, they encountered a terra-cotta bathtub full of tablets—they had fallen into the tub centuries before, when an upper story gave way. Also in the tub were bits of charred wood, suggesting the tablets had originally been stored in wooden boxes. This was confirmed elsewhere in the palace, when tablets were found next to a set of small bronze hinges—hinges that had held the wooden box lids in place. On May 10, Evans wrote his father that he had “just struck the largest deposit yet, some hundreds of pieces.”

Like the clay bar Evans first unearthed at the site, most of the Knossos tablets were small and wedge-shaped, between two and seven inches long and a half inch to three inches high. Tapered at the ends, they were clearly designed to fit comfortably in a scribe's hand. They were made of ordinary local clay, incised with a stylus of some kind.

In addition, there were some larger, squarer tablets, also made of clay and sometimes fashioned around armatures of straw. Where the smaller tablets had room for just a line or two of writing, perhaps ten or twenty characters in all, the larger tablets held much more. One very large rectangular tablet, more than ten inches high and six inches wide, was incised with twenty-four lines of text. It would come to be known as the “Man” tablet for the column of “man” pictograms (
) down its right-hand edge.