Milton C. Fisher
Arthur Evans seated among his Minoan artifacts and restorations,
as painted in 1907 by Sir William Richmond.
For all his accomplishments, Heinrich Schliemann died without fulfilling his third great ambition, to excavate at Knossos, Crete. There he saw possible roots of the early Greek civilization he had unearthed at Mycenae and Tiryns on the mainland. An Oxford educated English gentleman of leisure, Arthur John Evans, followed up on Schliemann’s hunch.
Evans engineered a thirty-year excavation at Knossos, near the Cretan port of Iraklion. The excavation was a relatively relaxed one, since Arthur Evans had been able to make a personal purchase of the entire site in the year 1896 and to acquire an able Scottish assistant, Duncan Mackenzie. Driven by his observation of the similarity of symbols on gems and pottery he had procured in Greece and then on Crete (visited after hearing the famous Schliemann lecture in London in 1883), he recovered the palace complex of fabled King Minos. Here stood the earliest known high civilization of Europe- an amazingly sophisticated “Minoan” (Evan’s label) Bronze Age culture, including a pair of ancient scripts.
There are usually several links in the chain of discovery and decipherment of ancient records. In this case, earlier decipherment (in 1872) by Assyriologist George Smith of similar writing found on Cyprus had been in turn made possible by discovery in 1869 of a Phoenician-Cypriote bilingual inscription. Work could then proceed on Evans’ “Linear A” and “Linear B” documents. These surfaced early in the dig, the first year of the 20th Century.
Not till half a century later, in 1952, was Linear B convincingly identified as the earliest Greek writing yet discovered. This was accomplished by a gifted young English architect, Michael Ventris, who had studied both classical and modem European languages at an early age. Just thirty when he deciphered Linear B as “Mycenaean Greek,” his life was tragically shortened by an automobile accident in 1956, but a collaborator, John Chadwick, has written Documents in Mycenaean Greek (1956), and a shorter popular work, The Decipherment of Linear B (1958), telling the story.
Arthur Evans’ earlier studies, his travels and reporting (on political convolutions in the Balkans, for the Manchester Guardian), and his collecting of coins and other artifacts all prepared him for efficient archaeological research. Recognition of Egyptian scarabs and pottery there at Knossos and ability to identify Middle Minoan pottery discovered in Egypt, along with Late Minoan type figures in Egyptian tomb paintings led him to a relatively precise comparison of their respective chronological periods.
No dilletante, Evans took seriously his original job (1884) as keeper of the Ashmolean (17th Century collection) Museum at Oxford University. There he turned a usually stagnant assignment into the active organization of holdings and addition of many fresh acquisitions. A new building was required after the first ten years of the twenty-five spent with the museum as his base of
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operation. Moreover, his earlier expulsion from the Balkans for “spying” was not Evans’ sole adventure. Not only had he travelled extensively to gain information and objects for the museum, but no sooner had he settled at Knossos after purchasing the historic tract of land than the Cretan’s revolt against their Turkish masters forced him to flee for safety. The new Greek authorities readily granted permission to dig to this Englishman who was so sympathetic to their cause.
Accused by some scholars of erecting a “concrete Crete” on his site, Evans’ active imagination and eagerness to solve all puzzles proved his partial undoing. Aided by a Swiss artist, he sought to interpret the fragments of Minoan wall frescoes, and architect Thomas Fyfe drew the “floor plans” of the remains to bring order out of rubble and chart the way for partial restoration. This latter project makes a favorable impression on thousands of tourists annually, while moving the skeptics to see a palace of Evans rather than of Minos.
As for that older script, “Linear A,” the debate goes on. Professor Cyrus H. Gordon gives convincing evidence for his conclusion that the language (as distinct from script) of Linear A is a Semitic dialect from the East Mediterranean coast. Northwest Semitic (“Phoenician”?) to be specific, in his Forgotten Scripts (New York: Basic Books, 1968). Not everyone agrees with him, however.
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