inventing the minoans archaeology, modernity and the quest for

Introduction

‘… in this particular encounter began the idea of “Europe” with all its arrogance, all its implication of superiority, all its assumptions of priority and antiquity, all its pretensions to a natural right to dominate’ (Ascherson 1995: 49).

In 1995 I descended the ‘Grand Staircase’ of the ‘Domestic Quarter’ of the ‘Palace of Minos at Knossos’ and was confronted with a tragic view of the interior of ‘Queen’s Megaron’ (Fig-ure 1, a-d). The traffic of human feet—mine included—over some 70 years since the recon-struction of the site by Sir Arthur Evans left

the original paving stones completely disinte-grated, whereas the concrete poured between the cobbles in the 1920s survived wonderfully intact, testimony to the enduring qualities of modernity. Looking up, the arched roofing system in reinforced concrete that Evans’s architects had put in place—the same arching that Christian Doll also employed in Evans’s residence at Knossos, the Villa Ariadne—had eroded to the extent that the iron girders rein-forcing the concrete were not only exposed, but badly corroded. Looking at the once brightly painted walls of the Queen’s Megaron, I noticed a lot of fading and discoloration, the

Inventing the Minoans: Archaeology, Modernity and the Quest for European Identity

John K. Papadopoulos

Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, Fowler Museum, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1510, USAE-mail: [email protected]

AbstractThis study explores the modern history of Minoan culture and the myth of Minoan archaeology. Emerging from the cultural milieu of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the genesis of this culture formed in the mind of Arthur Evans soon after he began excavations at Knossos in 1900. By 1930, he had transformed the site previously excavated by Minos Kalokairinos and earlier known as Tou Tseleve he Kephala and Ta Pitharia into the so-called Palace of Minos, and from poorly preserved ruins into a brightly painted, multi-storied, concrete vision of the past. After Evans’s death, the restored palace became one of the most visited archaeological sites in the world and, in the process, the restora-tion assumed its own historical identity and became a major problem of conservation. Evans was the first not only to restore a monument to such an extent, but also to use actual archaeological remains as a medium of expression. Beyond giving posterity his vision of the past, Evans was to have a much greater influence on archaeological thought than is currently conceded. Evans viewed his Minoans as the first great European culture, but it was his disciple, V. Gordon Childe, who was to apply the con-cept of an archaeological culture systematically in his The Dawn of European Civilization (1925), thereby making it a working tool for all European archaeologists. At the brink of modernity, archaeol-ogy became entangled with a quest for European identity, and the legacy of that time continues to exert its influence on the present.

Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 18.1 (2005) 87-149 ISSN (Print) 0952-7648 ISSN (Online) 1743-1700

© The Fund for Mediterranean Archaeology/Equinox Publishing Ltd., 2005

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latter most noticeable toward the central por-tion of the wall (Papadopoulos 1997), just the height where most human hands could reach. The realization that the discoloration was nothing more than human grime came, at first, as something of a surprise; but surprise gave way to the realization that most people like to touch antiquity. In their—our—attempt to commune with the past, millions of visitors to the site touched and retouched these walls in order to feel, to fondle, to caress ‘Minoan’ antiquity. This act of touching mystically had the effect of transporting the modern visitor from the world with which s/he was familiar, to one they essentially did not know. Yet what they touched—what they communed with—was not something built in the 2nd mil-lennium BC, but an edifice of the 1920s and 1930s: a monument to modernity. The con-ceptual space between the world we know and that which we do not know was miraculously bridged not through the common processes at work in both, but through the guiding hand of the person who invented the Minoans. In 1984 Chester Starr wrote:

Minoan civilization is the only great civi-lization created in the twentieth century. By 1900, the year when Arthur Evans began digging at Cnossus, a fair amount was already known about the cultural develop-ment of Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, and even the Maya of central America, though our knowledge has been much broadened and deepened for all these areas since that date… In reading modern accounts of these achievements we do, however, tend to for-get that the Minoans lived not in the twen-tieth century but in the second millennium B.C. (Starr 1984: 9, emphasis mine).

In so doing, Starr drew attention not only to the dangers of confusing interpretation with evidence, but opened the door to the much larger question of the invention of culture. By focusing on the modern creation of an ancient culture, this paper points to the influence of Sir

Arthur Evans not only in Old World archaeol-ogy early in the 20th century, but in the history of modern archaeological thought in general. It will be argued that Evans was among the first to give Europe a prehistoric identity to rival the non-European cultures of the ancient Near East, by inventing and appropriating the pre-Classical culture to which he gave the name ‘Minoan’. At the same time, it is argued that through disciples like Vere Gordon Childe Evans had a far greater effect on contempo-rary archaeological thought than is currently conceded (Evans only receives brief references in, for example, the standard work of Trigger 1989). Evans’s work has been enshrined in vir-tual hagiography (Brown 1983; 1993; J. Evans 1943; Harden 1983; Honour 1961; Horwitz 1981; MacGillivray 2000; also McDonald and Thomas 1990: 113-69). In a recent study by Leslie Fitton (1996: 115-39), Evans takes pride of place as the most heroic pioneer of Aegean prehistory (for an astute review, see Palmer 1996: 498-504), and Neil Asher Silberman (1995: 251) uses Arthur Evans, among other ‘real-life’ archaeologists, as well as fictional characters such as Indiana Jones, as paradigms of the ‘archaeologist as hero’. Despite the fact that many scholars have questioned some of Evans’s notions (e.g. Wace and Blegen 1939; Palmer 1963; 1969a; Raison 1969; Hallager 1977; and several papers in Hamilakis 2002), his legacy lives on. Evans’s passion for his Minoans was never a private affair, and his appropriation of ‘Greek’ cul-ture was not without precedent. Eliza May Butler (1935) was among the first to point to the obsession among the German educated élite with the ancient Greeks, and Suzanne Marchand (1996) has shown that German Graecophilia was not a private passion, but an institutionally generated and preserved cultural trope. But the focus of European and North American scholars on Germans and philhel-lenism has become a cliché, if not itself an obsession. This obsession with ancient Greece

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Figure 1a-d Interior of the Queen’s Megaron: a) discoloration of walls and doorjambs due to visitors; b) discolora-tion of polythyron and columns; c) floor showing most of original paving stones completely worn, while the concrete poured by Evans survives intact; d) arched roof with exposed iron girders badly corroded. (Author’s photographs.)

a)

b)

c)

d)

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was not an isolated German phenomenon, but one more deeply rooted in European and Western consciousness. In England, Hellenism and the Victorian vision of Greece was at the core of élite Vic-torian attitudes (Jenkins 1992; Jenkyns 1980; Pemble 1987; Tsigakou 1981), and an equally consuming force in contemporary North Amer-ica (Dyson 1998). It extended well beyond Winckelmann and his fetish for the ideal of Greek art, especially sculpture, in a modern context, beyond the fervency of enthusiasm for things Greek in the novels of George Eliot (Jenkyns 1980: 112-32), and even beyond the idealization of ancient cultures. ‘Hellenism’ in the West is about the way in which Western colonial powers have valued Greek culture, particularly ‘Classical’ culture, as embodying the founding spirit of their own (Hamilakis and Yalouri 1996). In 1846 John Stuart Mill penned his classic statement, published in the October issue of the Edinburgh Review:

The battle of Marathon, even as an event in English history, is more important than the battle of Hastings. If the issue of that day had been different, the Britons and the Saxons might still have been wandering in the woods (Mill 1978 [1846]: 273; cf. Urbinati 2002).

Yet the very concept of Hellas remains a disputed province of Western thought. As Artemis Leontis (1995: 17) has written, Hel-las is a ‘recurring topos of the modern literary imagination, it represents neither a mono-lithic essence nor an unchanging truth. The centers and limits of Hellas, both actual and imaginary, are constantly shifting, as differ-ent groups approach their ideal from distinct paths, with differing objectives.’ A related issue is addressed by Michael Herzfeld (1987), who has pointed out that since ancient Greece was the idealized spiritual and intellectual ances-tor of Europe, anthropology—the study of humankind that emerged from the heyday of European dominance—has found dispropor-

tionately little theoretical use for the Greece or Hellas of today. As for Crete, one commentator has remarked: ‘Evans’s revitalization of a wondrous world of peaceful prosperity, stable divine autocrats and a benevolent aristocracy, owes a great deal to the general political, social and emo-tional “Angst” in Europe of his time’ (Bintliff 1984: 35). For scholars working on the other side of the English Channel, the association by Evans of Minos and Europe was not lost, and Alexandre Farnoux (1993: 120-23) asked not long ago: ‘pax minoica…ou pax britannica?’ But Evans’s vision of a romantic and idealistic Minoan society influenced more than just British academe; it is a consuming and ever-present force in Cretan and Aegean prehistoric studies generally, whether British, French, Italian, German, North American or modern Greek. Farnoux’s pax minoica/britannica could well be extended to include much of Europe and North America. The aim of this study is to explore the com-plex issues of modernity (for which see, among others, Joachimides 1997; Klepper and Schöpp 2001; Preziosi 2003), European identity and the (re)construction of the past. While Arthur Evans genuinely discovered a massive quan-tity of archaeological material, the manner in which he used this material to (re)create the past forms one of the central issues of post-modern criticism: the question of whether or not any archaeologist can detach her/himself to describe the past objectively. This paper therefore seeks to analyze Minoan studies within the framework of the politics of the past (see Gathercole and Lowenthal 1990), and more particularly with the rise of Eurocentrism (Lambropoulos 1993). A major theme is how Evans claimed Bronze Age Crete in order to give ‘Europe’ a prehistoric identity to rival the non-European cultures of the ancient Near East. This is viewed against the backdrop of Evans’s longstanding personal involvement in the ‘Eastern Question’, as well as his colonial-



ist politics and the fact that Crete had been ravaged by Christian/Islamic civil war immedi-ately before the British excavations at Knossos were begun. This paper also deals with a series of issues relating to the modern—concrete—monument that is the ‘Palace of Minos’. Monuments such as the Athenian Parthenon (Balanos 1938; Mallouchou-Tufano 1998; Schmidt 1997) and Great Zimbabwe (Bent 1892; Trigger 1989: 130-35) were never lost from human view and served as blatant foci for human memory. Although lost from view for centuries, mythi-cal Knossos as a literary topos was never lost from memory. Evans’s physical reconstruction of the monument, as well as his landscaping around the site, forcing the building into the stark light and rural setting of 20th- and 21st-century Crete, is seen in its historical context. The Palace of Minos is as much a tribute to

Art Nouveau and Art Deco sensitivities as it is to anything pre-1900. Part of the reason lies in the fact that the site of Knossos was never a ruin in the 19th or 20th century. Evans made it a ruin. By constructing a ruin, particularly by affecting the unfinished look of walls and rooflines, Evans influenced the perception of antiquity (Figure 2). As Harbison (1991: 99) has shown, ruins are ideal in that the per-ceiver’s attitudes to them are so central as to constitute a way of seeing. Anything slipping into dereliction engages human feelings about where we see ourselves in history and, as such, Knossos as a modern building is one that uses the concept of the ruin as a sophisticated game (for the mentality and perception of ruins see Harbison 1991: 99-130). By effectively blurring the distinction between ancient and modern, Evans’s Knossos was to engage the perceptions of visitors in ways that historical

Figure 2. View of restored ‘Palace of Minos’ at Knossos showing the affected unfinished look of ruins. (Photograph courtesy of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.)

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monuments had never achieved before. And as an archaeological site, piety insists we leave it forever in place (cf. Harbison 1991: 120). The early part of the 20th century, par-ticularly the 1920s and 1930s, saw a number of contemporary reconstructions, such as Colo-nial Williamsburg, a project funded by John D. Rockefeller (Bath 1946; Gonzales 1991; Kimball et al. 1935; cf. Boddie 1923), or the reconstruction of the Bronze Age settlement at Unteruhldingen on Lake Constance in Ger-many in 1931 (Reinerth 1980: 12; Schmidt 1997: 47-48), that went well beyond anastylosis. The latter was a term coined Nikolaos Balanos, who was responsible for the re-erection of the Acropolis at Athens from 1895–1940, which was defined as the reassembly of existing but dismembered parts (Balanos 1938; Dimacopou-los 1985; Mallouchou-Tufano 1998; Schmidt 1997: 43). Balanos’s concept of anastylosis was established in 1931 in the Recommendations of the Athens Conference, and later embodied in The Venice Charter, which established binding principles for the conservation and restoration of monuments (Demas 1997; ICOMOS 1964; 1965; Schmidt 1997: 44). Knossos, however, along with Colonial Wil-liamsburg and Unteruhldingen, was the pro-genitor of more recent, but equally grand reconstructions. These included the Stoa of Attalos in the Athenian Agora, reconstructed between 1953 and 1956 by the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, also funded by John D. Rockefeller (Thompson and Wycherley 1972: 103-108, pls. 54-57, 112b; Schmidt 1997: 44-47), the Lejre Histori-cal-Archaeological Research Centre, founded in 1964 in Lejre, near Roskilde in Denmark (Hansen 1982; Schmidt 1997: 47-48), the Jor-vik Viking Centre in York, England, complete with a shopping centre built between 1976 and 1981 (Addyman and Gaynor 1984; Addyman 1990; Jorvik Viking Centre 1992; Schmidt 1997: 48-49), or Plimoth Plantation in Ply-mouth Massachusetts (Plimoth Plantation

1994; Schmidt 1997: 49). Knossos is, at least in part, a fictional world, a tourist attraction where one man’s vision, not just authenticity, is a critical issue. As the second most visited archaeological site in modern Greece, Knossos attracts a level of income of both national and local significance (Papadopoulos 1997). In addition to its economic significance, Knossos has been for decades a focus of national pride. In this respect, a related New World monument, the reconstruction of which was virtually contemporary to that of Evans’s Pal-ace of Minos, is the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan. As Bastien (1951: 62) has shown, the Mexican government of General Porfirio Diaz began, as early as 1904, ‘feverish prepara-tions for the first centennial of the Republic [of Mexico] in 1910’. Among other projects, Leopoldo Batres, then Chief of the Depart-ment of Archaeology, was commissioned by the Secretary of Public Education to uncover and rebuild the huge ‘Hill of the Sun’ in Teotihuacan, located only some 50 km north of the modern capital of Mexico City (Bastien 1951: 62). This Batres achieved in record time, though with little surviving documentation (Batres 1906; 1919), and before the Diaz gov-ernment was ousted by the revolution in 1910. Further excavations at the site were renewed in 1917, as part of an exhaustive study of the Valley of Teotihuacan (Bastien 1951: 62). This included a reconstruction of the ‘Pyramid of the Sun’ by the architect Ignacio Marquina, which was widely accepted by scholars at the time. Bastien’s subsequent study of the Pyramid of the Sun between 1945 and 1947 concluded that ‘the whole picture of the monument had been completely misconceived by Batres’ and that Batres had, in fact, inadvertently destroyed part of the monument by tearing from it succes-sive layers (Bastien 1947; 1951: 62-63). The early 20th-century interventions by Evans and the flurry of contemporary other reconstructions of archaeological sites are seen in the light of Riegl’s (1903) discourse on



monuments and their value(s). The preserva-tion of ancient—and other—heritage, how-ever, goes deeper than the description of values, especially when values clash, to a moral dilemma (Herzfeld 1991). In this context, one especially relevant ‘pseudo-monument’ is Jarn Mound, a fake prehistoric mound that Arthur Evans built himself near his Oxford house in order to block housing construction in the neighborhood (Figure 3). Evans was therefore no stranger to the physical invention of the past. ‘Though ecology was not yet a familiar word, Evans’s vocabulary was quite equal to his purposes’ (Horwitz 1981: 224). Almost three years in the making, measuring 15 m in height and 162 m in circumference, Jarn Mound—so named after the local name for the area—was constructed by Evans in order ‘to protect the peak of Boar’s Hill from building speculators

and to safeguard its broad view over Oxford and the tranquil countryside’ (Horwitz 1981: 224-25). It served its purpose well by pre-venting the development of the immediate countryside, but it also highlights the manner in which Evans invented the past through the construction of ‘antiquities’, real or imagined. Another issue that this paper addresses is Evans’s legacy and influence, not only on the scholarly community. Few scholars have ever achieved the level of popularity that Evans did with his discoveries at Knossos. Reported constantly in the press, Evans’s discoveries appealed to the popular imagination. I have focused a great deal in the following pages on contemporary newspaper reports, in an attempt to contextualize better Minoan studies in the earlier 20th century. The level of media cover-age given to Knossos goes well beyond the fact

Figure 3. Jarn Mound, a fake prehistoric mound that Arthur Evans built himself near his Oxford house in order to block housing construction in the area. (After Harden 1983: pl. 22.)

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that Arthur Evans was himself a newspaperman and therefore well connected with the media moguls of the day. His media persona and the modern identity he gave Knossos continue to fascinate and delight (Papadopoulos 1997). A recent full-color report on Knossos, entitled ‘Pride of the Minoans: Saving the Royal Palace of Knossos’ (or ‘Saving Knossos: The Struggle to Preserve a Landmark of Europe’s First Great Civilization’) appeared in the 50th anniversary series of Archaeology magazine, complete with a full-color image of ‘La Parisienne’ on the cover (Harrington 1999). The level of media coverage achieved by Evans in his own time can be gauged even as early as 4 July 1901, when Sigmund Freud, in one of his last letters to Wilhelm Fliess, wrote:

Have you read that the English excavated an old palace in Crete (Knossos), which they declare to be the real labyrinth of Minos? … This is the cause for all sorts of thoughts too premature to write down (quoted in D’Agata 1994: 7, 14).

Although knowing Greek well, including Homer’s work, Freud’s imagination—like modernity itself—was deeply affected by the excavations at Knossos (Freud et al. 1985: 74-75) and, as D’Agata (1994: 14-15) has shown, by 1933, near the conclusion of his life’s work, Freud was still meditating on the Cretan leg-ends and the Labyrinth. Finally, this paper deals with the afterlife of the vision of Evans’s Europe, particularly how one of his followers, V. Gordon Childe, championed the notion of ‘Europe’ as an entity in prehistory and established the idea of ‘European archaeology’ as a major field of study in its own right. Given the hagiography surrounding Gordon Childe (Trigger 1980), my drawing a direct intellectual connection between Evans and Childe will not be popular; but together they helped to forge and establish an idealized and robustly 20th-century vision of Europe in prehistory.

The Pre- and Protohistory of Minoan Studies

The story begins with Minos. In 1900 he was known only from several later references in Greek literature and from a few representa-tions in ancient art (Bazant 1992). Neither his palace, nor the site of Knossos, were known and there was no such thing as a ‘Minoan cul-ture’; it is also useful to remember that, whereas the Homeric epic captured a representation of Mycenaean Greece, no Classical source on Minos confirms a civilization comparable to ‘Minoan’ (Karo 1959: 3; S.P. Morris 1992a: 182-83). One of the earliest and most com-prehensive references to this legendary king is in Book I of Thucydides’ untitled history of the Peloponnesian war, in that part of the text ironically referred to by modern scholars as the ‘Archaeology’. The Athenian historian, writing in the 5th century BC, states:

Minos, according to tradition, was the first person to organize a navy. He controlled the greater part of what is now called the Hellenic Sea; he ruled over the Cyclades, in which he founded the first colonies, putting his sons in as governors after having driven out the Carians. And it is reasonable to suppose that he did best to put down piracy in order to secure his own revenues (Thu-cydides I.4).

It is ironic that the myth of the thalassocracy of Minos was probably invented by and/or for Athenian overseas hegemony in the Classical period (Baurain 1991; van Effenterre and van Effenterre 1991; Morris 1992a: 355-56; Starr 1954-55; 1978; 1989: 12-13). Be that as it may, for anyone living in Victorian or Edwardian England, at the very brink of modernity, in a Europe largely determined and defined by Empires, Kings, Tsars and Kaisers, the leg-endary founder of the first colonies, and the first to organize a navy, must have seemed the prototype of the Super-Briton. And it is per-haps no coincidence that this mythical Minos, dredged up from obscurity by Greek mythog-



raphers and historians of the Classical period, gave his name to an entire culture, one of the most archaeologically visible in ‘Europe’ since 1900. Full credit for the launching of Minos’s modern career belongs to Arthur John Evans. On 23 March 1900, Evans embarked on his full-scale excavation at the prehistoric site on the Kephala Hill at Knossos and immediately came across the remains of the building (or buildings) he was to call the ‘Palace of Minos’ (Brown 1983; Hood and Taylor 1981). The discovery, later referred to as ‘the find of a lifetime’ (J. Evans 1943; Harden 1983; Horwitz 1981), followed closely on Heinrich Schlie-mann’s discoveries at Troy and Mycenae, and brought to light a hitherto unknown civiliza-tion, dubbed the Minoan. Evans’s Minoans were broadly accepted and widely advertised in the media of the earlier 20th century (see below). Against such a backdrop, other major discoveries, including Christos Tsountas’s pio-neering work, both in the Aegean islands and on mainland Greece, did not attract a similar response, even though Tsountas had taken back the prehistory of Greece—and Europe—to an even more remote past. A methodical archaeologist who promptly published his results, Tsountas, despite bringing to light the Neolithic of Greece and the remarkable Early Bronze Age of the Cyclades, as well as discov-ering the ‘palace’ at Mycenae, not only failed to stir the popular imagination, but is generally overlooked in most textbooks dealing with the history of archaeology, in part because he published in modern Greek. Tsountas does not appear in Trigger’s (1989) standard work, and his name is referred to once in Daniel (1967: 150), and then only in a long passage by Evans himself. A somewhat longer, but by no means full account of Tsountas’s achievement is provided by Fitton (1996: 104-114), although largely only as someone who bridges the gap between Schliemann and Evans. Elsewhere (e.g. in McDonald and Thomas 1990: 87-110), Tsountas’s work at Mycenae (Tsountas 1893;

Tsountas and Manatt 1897) is well outlined, but since the focus is Mycenaean civilization, his achievement with regard to the Cycla-des and Neolithic Thessaly is barely touched upon. The same textbooks, however, did not over-look the achievements of Evans and Schlie-mann, both of whom wrote in English or, in the case of Schliemann, had his monographs trans-lated into English. As Bruce Trigger has shown, Schliemann’s discoveries, more than anything else, awakened not only classical scholars to the realization that ancient mythology and epic poetry might be connected with histori-cal events and actual places. From this time forward, the public has often looked to archae-ology to support or to uproot diverse historical, political and social movements throughout the world (Trigger 1989: 3). Unlike Schliemann, however, Evans’s excavations took him back before classical Greece and even before Schlie-mann’s Homeric Greece. Without the aid of substantial texts, Evans ventured into a realm of interpretation based purely on objects and architecture, the very stuff of the archaeologi-cal record, and his own vivid imagination. The building on the Kephala Hill—origi-nally known as Tou Tseleve he Kephala (Hood and Taylor 1981: 1)—was already interpreted as a palace since the first excavations at the site by Minos Kalokairinos in the winter of 1878–79 (Haussoullier 1880; Spanakis 1960; Aposkitou 1979). The excavations of Kalokai-rinos were conducted only a few years after Schliemann’s excavations at Tiryns and Myce-nae. Kalokairinos’s soundings (now featured in the novel by Rhea Galanaki [2002]) hit upon the west magazines of the so-called palace, exposing a dozen intact pithoi, some of which were sent to museums in London, Paris, Rome and Athens. On account of these pithoi, the site came to be known as Ta Pitharia. Schlie-mann himself, as well as Wilhelm Dörpfeld and Ernst Fabricius, considered the remains uncovered by Kalokairinos as belonging to a

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Mycenaean palace (Evans 1899–1900: 4; Fab-ricius 1886; Haussouillier 1880). Only a few weeks after Kalokairinos’s excavations were halted by the authorities, either at the end of February 1879 or in April of the same year (Haussoullier 1880: 125, states that Kalokai-rinos’s excavations were conducted until the end of February 1879, whereas Aposkitou 1979 claims that the excavations continued until April), Thomas B. Sandwith wrote the first of three letters, dated 27 April 1879, to Charles T. Newton, then Keeper of the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities in the British Museum (Hood 1987). As Sinclair Hood has shown, this correspondence attempted to initi-ate a British excavation at Knossos, and in so doing carried the story of British interest at the site 15 years earlier than John Myres’ abortive effort to secure permission to excavate ‘Gnos-sos’ in 1893 (Hood 1987: 85; Brown 1986). The American William J. Stillman—the great pioneer photographer of archaeological sites—who visited the site in 1881 and reported it to the newly formed Archaeological Institute of America, believed the remains to be the legendary Labyrinth, and added his name to the list of those who aspired to excavate the site (Stillman 1880–81). As Hood and Smyth (1981: 1-2) and others have shown (Brown 1986; Hood 1987), this was a long and emi-nent list of Aegean archaeologists, including Heinrich Schliemann and Federico Halbherr (Halbherr 1893; Stoll 1961; also Perrot and Chipiez 1894a: 442, n. 3). In 1883, with Troy and Mycenae already under his belt, Schliemann wrote to Photia-des Pasha, the Turkish Governor-General of Crete, about obtaining permission to exca-vate the site on the Kephala Hill (Hood and Taylor 1981: 1). All of Schliemann’s efforts, however, were in vain. First, there was the exorbitant price demanded by the owner of the land. More importantly, an influential cadre of Greek opinion in Crete, in part fuelled by scholars such as Josef Hazzidakis, who later dug

at Tylissos, was anxious to prevent any excava-tions while the island of Crete was still under Turkish rule. As a consequence, Crete was one of the earliest places in what was to become modern Greece where archaeology and nation-alism became embroiled. Hazzidakis was the President of the Herakleion Syllogos, a society that collected and preserved the antiquities of the island. The Syllogos also maintained a museum, which was to become the nucleus of the Archaeological Museum at Herakleion (Brown 1993: 36). It was feared that important finds might be removed to Constantinople, or that the collection in Herakleion might be destroyed by the Turks in the event of another revolt (Hood and Taylor 1981: 2; Stoll 1961: 58, 63 n. 3, 67). Kalokairinos’s collection, including some of the finds from his excava-tions at Knossos which he kept in his home at Herakleion, was indeed destroyed along with his house by fire in the disturbances of 1898 (Hood and Taylor 1981: 1). Within a few days of his first visit to Knossos in 1894, Evans began negotiations to gain con-trol of the land. It was not, however, until the beginning of 1900, the year after the final lib-eration of Crete from Turkish rule, that Evans was able to complete the purchase of the whole Kephala site and begin his historic excavations (Hood and Taylor 1981: 2). In the end it was Evans’s vigor and determination that prevailed and, from the very beginning of the excava-tions in 1900, the palace as a central building was well distinguished from the excavations of the town and other prehistoric monuments in the greater area of the site (for which see Hogarth 1899–1900), an area comprising some 5 km north-south and a maximum of 3 km east-west (Hood and Smyth 1981: 1). When Evans finally began his excavations at Knossos, Kalokairinos’s name and legacy were relegated to virtual obscurity, especially for the public, and Evans quickly assumed the mantle of excavator and, in many contexts, discoverer of Knossos. What began as an act of early 20th-



century British colonialism became enshrined in textbooks, whereas Kalokairinos continues to be largely overlooked. As early as 1894, Evans stated that the build-ing on the Kephala Hill, whether Labyrinth, Palace or Andreion (the latter suggestion was first put forward by Halbherr), belonged to the ‘great age of Mycenae’ (Evans 1894: 281). In his first excavation report, Evans applied the term ‘Mycenaean’ to the Bronze Age material he was uncovering (Evans 1899–1900; see also Evans and Myres 1895). Although the same term was widely used in the second report, in 1901, the term ‘Minoan’ began making its appearance (e.g. Evans 1900–1901: 22-24 n. 1). By the time of the first volume of The Palace of Minos (Evans 1921), the term ‘Mycenaean’ was rejected by Evans, and ‘Minoan’ firmly established. This did not meet with unanimous approval: in 1910, for example, Sir William Ridgeway (1909–10; see also 1931: 317-18), then Disney Professor of Archaeology at Cam-bridge, strongly rejected the term ‘Minoan’ as it was applied by Evans and his followers (for a rejoinder see Evans 1921: 13 n. 1). One of Ridgeway’s most influential students—Alan Wace—was to become one of Evans’s most outspoken critics (for Ridgeway’s influence on Wace, see Stubbings 1958). According to Wace and Carl Blegen, who championed the cause of the Mycenaean mainland, the problem was not so much Evans himself, but that ‘cautious, canny Highlander’, Duncan Mackenzie (Momigliano 1995; 1999). Undeterred, Evans, by 1912, saw his Minoans as the source of all future Greek civilization. He wrote: ‘Can it be doubted that the artistic genius of the later Hellenes was largely the outcome of that inherent in the earlier race in which they had been merged?’ (Evans 1912: 278). In the same publication Evans not only swept aside the Mycenaeans as a provincial variant of the Minoans, he even argued that the Homeric myths were largely drawn from earlier Minoan versions (Evans 1912).

More than anything else, what drew Evans to the site in the first place were a number of ‘strange signs’—now known as masons’ marks—inscribed on blocks in certain parts of the building, which Kalokairinos chanced upon and which Stillman (1880–81) noted. During his first visit to the site on 19 March 1894, Evans was particularly eager to see these marks, which Kalokairinos showed him. These signs were of special interest to Evans, since he strongly believed in an earlier pre-alphabetic writing system in Greece. By 1908, Evans could state:

The idea, formerly prevalent among classi-cal scholars, that, before the introduction of the Phoenician alphabet, there was no developed system of written communication in Ancient Greece, has now fairly broken down. In itself such an assumption shows not only a curious lack of imagination, but a deliberate shutting of the eyes on the evi-dence supplied by primitive races all over the world (Evans 1908: 9; also 1909: 1-8).

In the same publication, Evans (1908: 9) went on to exclaim:

Was it possible, in view of these analo-gies, to believe that a form of early culture which reached the stage revealed to us by Schliemann’s discoveries at Mycenae was, from the point of view of written commu-nication, below that of the Red Indians?

Elsewhere he writes:

It is now seven years since a piece of evi-dence came into my hands which went far to show that long before the days of the introduction of the Phoenician alphabet, as adopted by the later Greeks, the Cretans were, in fact possessed of a system of writing (Evans 1901; cited in Daniel 1967: 153).

As early as his first excavation report, the lan-guage is more circumspect, more ‘scientific’. Evans (1899–1900: 4) writes:

The curious signs on the gypsum blocks seemed to have a bearing on the special

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object of my investigations, the existence, namely, in Crete of a prehistoric system of writing’

Evans’s insistence on an early form of writ-ing in Greece makes sense in the context of the stunning developments during the 19th century in the study of ancient Near East-ern civilizations, especially Egyptology and Assyriology. In the late 18th century, virtually nothing was known about the ancient civiliza-tions of Egypt and the Near East, except what was recorded in the Bible and by the ancient Greeks, as well as the Romans (Larsen 1996; Trigger 1989: 39). The systematic investiga-tion of Egypt by French scholars who accom-panied Napoleon in his invasion of Egypt in 1798–99, culminating in Jean-François Champollion’s (1790–1832) decipherment of Egyptian script, was followed by Georg Grotefend’s (1775–1853) early attempts to translate cuneiform and by Henry Rawlinson’s (1810–1895) success in the mid-19th century in deciphering an older Babylonian language through the study of the Old Persian version of the trilingual text carved on the cliff at Behistun by Darius I (Brunner-Traut 1984; Daniel 1967: 197-210; Trigger 1989: 39-40). These linguistic developments were accom-panied by the spectacular finds of Paul-Emile Botta at Nineveh and Khorsabad, and Austen Layard’s discoveries at Nimrud and Kuyunjik (to mention only a few), adding a whole new arena to the impressive array of Egyptian art that Giovanni Belzoni and others had laid before Europe (Trigger 1989: 39-40; Fagan 1975). Egypt continues to exert its profound influence on the western psyche through both Egyptophilia and Egyptomania (see Leclant and Clerc 1985: 630-47 for the distinction between ‘Egyptophilia’ and ‘Egyptomania’; also various papers in Humbert et al. 1994). These developments in Egyptology and Assyriology added over 3,000 years of history to two crucial regions of special interest to

biblical studies. The steady flow of new textual material, as well as vast amounts of sculpture and other ancient Near Eastern finds, aroused enormous interest in Europe, since the texts in particular not only paralleled early stories in the Bible, but took them back to an even more remote past (cf. Trigger 1989: 40). Although both Egyptology and Assyriology were dis-ciplines modeled on classical studies, they directly challenged the chronological primacy of Europe and precipitated notions of cultural continuity by a Europe eager to identify roots as old as possible for Greek civilization, as if in competition with the discovery of Mesopo-tamian prehistory (Morris 1992a: 183; Trigger 1989: 39-40; cf. Herzfeld 1982). In the face of such Biblical antiquity, the sorts of develop-ments in European archaeology nurtured by Arthur Evans’s father and his wide circle of associates paled into insignificance, and even the grandeur of Periclean Athens or Imperial Rome, which now seemed recent in compari-son, could hardly claim the exulted positions they previously enjoyed. Europe was now in need not only of an early ‘high civilization’, but of a language to fit. Evans had a point to make and the site of Knossos gave him the potential to make it. From the very first season Evans assembled a talented team of collaborators and assistants. These included Theodore Fyfe, then archi-tect of the British School of Archaeology at Athens. He worked as Evans’s architect from 1900 to 1904 and visited the site intermit-tently over the following years. Fyfe went on to become Director of the Cambridge School of Architecture (1922–36) and University Lecturer in Architecture (Brown 1983: 15). This assured the building at Knossos a promi-nent place in the training of British architects, as well as a permanent place in the history of 20th-century architecture. Fyfe also wrote the first paper fully devoted to the conservation of the palace at Knossos (Fyfe 1926); he died in 1945.



Perhaps the greatest role in the excavations, however, was played by Dr Duncan Macken-zie, Evans’s assistant and the supervising field- archaeologist responsible for the keeping of the ‘Daybooks’. With regard to these, Colin Renfrew was to remark that they were ‘out-standing examples of systematic archaeological reasoning, produced at a time when scientific principles of excavation had not yet been established. Duncan Mackenzie was one of the very first scientific workers in the Aegean’ (quoted in Brown 1983: 19). Evans drew heavily on Mackenzie’s notebooks in writing up both the preliminary reports and the larger The Palace of Minos. In 1905, Fyfe was succeeded by Christian Doll, then architectural student of the British School at Athens, who was soon responsible for the massive task of restoring the ‘Grand Staircase’ of the ‘Domestic Quarter’ (Evans 1904–1905: 23-26; 1927; see also Shaw and Lowe 2002). Doll also oversaw in 1906–1907 the construction of the Villa Ariadne, Evans’s private house at Knossos (Brown 1983: 30; see also Powell 1973), a building incorporating in its design many of the same Art Nouveau and Art Deco elements used in the reconstruction of the palace itself. It should be noted that the employment of an architect, an essential element in any modern excavation in the Aegean, was somewhat of a novelty at the time when Fyfe and Doll worked at Knossos (see Brown 1983: 30; Palyvou 2003), though it was a practice already well-established by Schliemann in his employment of Dörpfeld. Even the first foreman of the excavation, Gre-gorios Antoniou, brought out from Cyprus, was an experienced excavator, having spent his youth robbing tombs in Cyprus, and later assisting D.G. Hogarth on excavations in Cyprus and Crete; he subsequently worked for the British School at Sparta (Brown 1983: 15). The tradition of using Greek workmen for excavations in regions where those work-men are not native, by members of the British

School at Athens, continues to this day (e.g. Mervyn Popham and his collaborators brought out Cretan workmen for their excavations at Lefkandi on Euboia: Popham et al. 1980: ix). This was a well-established colonial tradition in many parts of the Mediterranean and the Near East. In addition to working closely with a team of specialists, a large observation tower, which also served for photography, was soon built by the excavators at the southeast edge of the Central Court (Brown 1983: 18, fig. 3); a version of the tower can be seen already in a photograph taken during the campaign of 1901 (Evans 1900–1901: 96-97, pl. II). This allowed for a level of photography rarely seen in archaeology, whether in Evans’s time or more recently. The meticulous photographic record kept by the excavators, now housed in the Evans Archive at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, was capped off by the publi-cation, in 1935, of an aerial view of the palace (Evans 1935: xxvi-xxvii). Evans was also able to afford the services of the Swiss artist Emile Gilliéron, who first visited the site as early as 1900, and later of his son, also Emile; together they were responsible for restoring the frescoes (Brown 1983: 22). In addition to specializing in archaeological draw-ing, having been employed by various foreign archaeological schools in Athens, the elder Gilliéron served as drawing master to the royal Greek court (R. Hood 1998: 24). More impor-tantly, he ran a business in Athens, based at Odos Skoufa 43 in the fashionable Kolonaki district, making copies of ancient works of art (Horwitz 1981: 114; Lapatin 2002). The establishment was close to the various foreign schools of archaeology and thus to his main customers. Gilliéron père was among the first of his countrymen to run a lucrative busi-ness that turned replicas of ancient works of art into tangible profits. The introduction to the illustrated catalogue of the Gilliérons’ wares, entitled Galvanoplastische Nachbildungen

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mykenischer und kretischer (minoischer) Alter-tümer [Galvanoplastic Copies of Mycenaean and Cretan (Minoan) Antiquities], was written by none other than Professor Dr Paul Wolters, then Director of the Royal Glypothek at Munich and formerly of the Imperial German Institute at Athens (Figure 4). With Wolters affirming that the copies sold by Gilliéron were produced with the help of exact moldings, the

copies were made and sold by the Württemberg-ische Metallwarenfabrik; they could also be ordered direct from Emile Gilliéron and Son. Others who assisted Evans at Knossos included F.G. Newton, who also worked at Ur, John Pendlebury, who while working at Knossos also directed the excavations at Tell el-Amarna for the Egypt Exploration Society, and Piet de Jong (R. Hood 1998). As Captain

Figure 4. Cover of the multilingual (German, French, English) catalogue Galvanoplastic Copies of Mycenaean and Cretan (Minoan) Antiquities, offered for sale by E. Gilliéron and Son from their workshop on Odos Skoufa, in the fashionable Kolonaki district of Athens.



Pendlebury on special service with the Brit-ish forces stationed in Crete, ‘Blebbery’ as the Cretans knew him, was killed following the German airborne invasion of Crete on 20 May 1941 (see Horwitz 1981: 246-47). According to Honour (1961: 172): ‘He died in the vicinity of the palace while helping defend the Cretans whom he loved and admired as inheritors of a great tradition’ (the circumstances of his death are best presented in Powell 1973). Perhaps more than anything else, the Battle of Crete in 1941 made the island a British preserve, and while British (together with Australian and New Zealand) archaeologists—and tour-ists—were later welcome, German archaeolo-gists and tourists were not in many parts of the island. Among Evans’s other assistants, Piet de Jong, appointed by Evans in 1922 at the very time when reinforced concrete began to replace the earlier and simpler supports of wood and iron (Papadopoulos 1997), continued to be involved with the site until his death in 1967, serving as Curator of Knossos between 1947 and 1952 (Brown 1983: 30; R. Hood 1998: 225-70). A talented draftsman who worked on numerous other archaeological projects, including Carl Blegen’s excavations at Pylos and the American excavations in the Athe-nian Agora (Alexiou 1965), de Jong became well known for his interior watercolor recon-structions of famous monuments, including the ‘Throne Room’ of the so-called Palace of Nestor at Pylos. At Knossos, however, he imparted his Art Nouveau and Art Deco sensitivities not in the glimmering shades of watercolor or gauche, but in reinforced concrete. Whatever the accuracy of the res-toration of the ‘Palace of Minos’, the building today represents one of the finest examples of 1920s architecture anywhere in modern Greece (Bammer 1990; Papadopoulos 1997: 110). But before discussing the concrete real-ity of Evans’s legacy, it is important to con-sider the vision that preceded it.

A ‘European’ Culture that Never Was: Evans, his Vision and the Prehistory of Europe

For Evans, Knossos was to become a good deal more than the object of scientific investiga-tion; it was a monument in which his dreams could live. He had a vision of the past, best set out in his own words; in the third volume of The Palace of Minos, well before ‘reconstitu-tion’ was complete, Evans wrote:

During an attack of fever, having found, for the sake of better air, a temporary lodging in the room below the inspection tower that has been erected on the neighbouring edge of the Central Court, and tempted in the warm moonlight to look down the stair-case-well, the whole place seemed to awake awhile to life and movement. Such was the force of the illusion that the Priest-King [see below] with his plumed lily crown, great ladies, tightly girdled, flounced and cor-seted, long-stoled priests, and, after them, a retinue of elegant but sinewy youths—as if the Cup-bearer and his fellows has stepped down from the walls—passed and repassed on the flights below (Evans 1930: 301; also quoted in Honour 1961: 162; Brown 1983: 35; Bintliff 1984: 35).

Elsewhere he states:

The colonnades standing out against the glittering gypsum dados and the painted frieze above (of which portions have now come to light) with its linked spi-rals and rosettes; the ascending flights of stairs—to which fresh evidence supplied by two corner blocks now enables us to add a fifth; the low convenient balustrades that accompany the stairs, tier above tier, upon which, as in the miniature frescoes from the North Hall of the Palace, we seem to see the Court ladies in their bril-liant modern costume with pinched waists and puffed sleeves seated in groups and exchanging glances with elegant youths in the court below—dark-eyed these, with dark, flowing locks, sinewy, bronzed, and

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bare of limb save for the tightly-drawn metal belt and ornaments, and their richly embroidered loincloths. A note of mystery is added by the window, now freed from débris, in the wall to the right, which opens on to the landing of another and more pri-vate staircase. Here surely—if fancy indeed may transport her to a sublunary scene—at times may have looked out that Princess of most ancient romance whose name is indissolubly linked with the memories of Minoan Knossos (Evans 1905; also quoted in Brown 1983: 81-82).

An equally revealing insight is provided by Evans’s half-sister, Joan Evans, who writes:

Time and Chance had made him the discoverer of a new civilization, and he had to make it intelligible to other men. Fortunately it was exactly to his taste: set in beautiful Mediterranean country, aristo-cratic and humane in feeling; creating an art brilliant in colour and unusual in form, that drew inspiration from the flowers and birds and creatures that he loved. It pro-vided him with enigmas to solve and ora-cles to interpret, and opened a new world for eye and mind to dwell in: a world which served to isolate him from a present in which he had found no real place (J. Evans 1943; also quoted in Fitton 1996: 137).

A similar fascination with an idealized Minoan society pervades Aegean prehistory to this day. By the early 1960s, scholars such as V.E.S. Kenna could state, in a scholarly publication:

The dancing floor which Daedalus made for fair Ariadne, the reputation of Minos as judge—enthroned perpetually, the beauty and speed of Cretan galleys for which the wide-spread commerce of the Ancient World, the records of Egypt and the seal stones of Ancient Crete bear witness, sug-gest a freedom and enthusiasm which could assess the present not as a slave to the past, not as pregnant of the future, but as some-thing in itself, whose value lay ready for

immediate grasp… This dispassionate view and fresh approach to nature, and with it the freedom to experiment and enjoy with-out being fettered to the past are aspects of a way of life which made more fruitful the great literary, historical and religious tradition which came to the West from the Near East. Here then is the beginning of our culture. To this perhaps we must return to refresh ourselves from the noise and con-fusion of an impatient technology (Kenna 1961–62: 248, 251).

And this same fascination is also well reflected in John Bintliff’s statement:

It may seem surprising that this romantic and idealistic vision of an innocent, strife-less, fair society, survived to form a control-ling model for my generation, but we have to recall the 1960s rejection of the Materi-alist, Consumer ethos of the 1950s, symbol-ized by Flower Power and the fascination with alternative worlds such as Eastern Mysticism, the Commune, Pot, and Lewis Binford. The collapse of this 1960s to early ’70s renewed optimism in the perfectabil-ity or regeneration of modern society, is reflected in the surge of archaeological research from the 1970s into the origins of inequality, the rise of elites and modes of coercion, the ‘punch behind the priest’ and so on (Bintliff 1984: 36).

The influence of Evans on archaeologi-cal thought, however, goes deeper than the absorption in the 1920s and 1930s, and again in the 1960s and 1970s, in an idealized vision of a past society. Although Fitton (1996: 137) has stated that it ‘would be cynical, and certainly exaggerated to say that the Minoan world was so exactly to Evans’s taste because it was largely the product of his imagination, but there can be no doubt that he projected onto his finds images that he wanted to see’, the point is perhaps best stated by Starr (1984: 9): ‘Although many men and women have col-laborated to revive Minoan civilization, the picture which most of us have in our minds



remains essentially that so skillfully impressed on the Western world by Arthur Evans.’ In order to understand Evans’s legacy, as well as the site of Knossos and what may be described as its modern identity, one has to understand Evans himself (MacEnroe 1995; McNeal 1973). Born in Nash Mills, Hert-fordshire, on 8 July 1851, and living 90 years until 1941, Evans from many perspectives had a good innings. His longevity was to play an important role, since he straddled the Vic-torian era and much of the first half of the 20th century, surviving until the beginning of the Second World War. In 1931, at the age of 80, he returned to Crete and, with John Pendlebury and Piet de Jong, excavated the so-called Temple Tomb (Evans 1935: 964-83)—itself one of the most amazing stories in Minoan archaeology and one deserving a more detailed investigation, since it was the ‘discovery’ of the Ring of Minos, considered by many a modern forgery, that led to the dis-covery and excavation of the Temple Tomb, the long sought-after cenotaph of Minos. Evans’s final visit to Knossos was in 1935, when he was honored with a ceremony and the unveiling of the bronze bust dedicated to him, which still stands in the west court of the palace; he died six years later at his home in Boar’s Hill in Oxford (Brown 1983; Harden 1983). His longevity was to play a further role, for it was not until the age of almost 50 that he embarked on the massive undertaking of both excavating and restoring Knossos. It is impos-sible to provide here even a cursory biography of the man, nor is it necessary in view of the existing bibliography. I want, however, to point to two important aspects that emerge from Evans’s early days as an undergraduate and Balkans correspondent. First of all, his extensive travels opened his eyes to what may be termed European archaeology and an acquaintance with the material culture of a region well beyond the normal focus of an Oxford education and well outside the typi-

cal ‘Grand Tour’; it was perhaps here that the first seeds of anti-classicism were planted in Evans’s mind (not to mention that he was turned down for an Oxford fellowship). Sec-ondly, the fact that he had established himself as a newspaper man was to hold him in good stead in later years, for few archaeological dis-coveries received the level of media coverage that the palace at Knossos enjoyed. It is also worth noting that the rather unconventional, ‘non-scientific’, almost ‘journalistic’ style of The Palace of Minos, and Evans’s prolific writ-ten output are not coincidental (Heurtley 1936; MacEnroe 1995: 13-14). Evans wrote not only for the scholarly community, but for a much larger public. In the summer of 1884, Evans was appointed Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, at the time still housed in Broad Street, in a building inadequate for the growing collection of European antiquities (Brown 1993: 29-34). He soon set out his ambitions for the museum in an inaugural lecture aptly titled ‘The Ash-molean Museum as a Home of Archaeology in Oxford’ (Evans 1884; MacEnroe 1995: 10). As the title suggests, Evans’s aim was to establish the museum as a center embracing the whole range of European archaeology, not just that of one particular region or part of Europe. This progressive view was to become, in later years, one bordering on the anti-classical. In the decade that was to follow, he continued his travels, often with his wife and father-in-law (in 1878 Evans married Margaret Freeman, the daughter of Augustus Freeman, who was to become Regius Professor of Modern His-tory at Oxford, and the relationship with Freeman also gave Evans a familial advocate in Oxford), making important acquisitions for the museum (Brown 1993: 29). The son of the wealthy industrialist and amateur archaeolo-gist of distinction, and former Balkans corre-spondent, was now an established professional in Oxford. In 1893 his wife Margaret died; the following year the Ashmolean was moved to

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its present location in Beaumont Street and Evans visited Crete for the first time in the spring of that year. In 1894 he also moved into Youlbury, the house he built for himself and Margaret on Boar’s Hill (Brown 1993: 33). Together, the events of 1893 and 1894 were to have a profound effect on the personal life of Arthur Evans. A combination of Time and Chance, the title of Joan Evans’s biography of her half-brother (J. Evans 1943), was to place Arthur Evans well with regard to the history of archaeology, especially since the important developments in European prehistory in the 19th century were being thrashed out in Scandinavia and in Brit-ain, not least by close associates of John Evans, Arthur’s father. Earlier points of view, such as that of Rasmus Nyerup (1759–1829), best expressed in his lament ‘Everything that has come down to us from heathendom is wrapped in a thick fog; it belongs to a space of time we cannot measure’ (Daniel 1967: 80-81; Trigger 1989: 71), were being seriously challenged. The first move toward establishing order among the chaos came from two of Nyerup’s countrymen: Christian Jürgensen Thomsen (1788–1865), who succeeded Nyerup as Secretary of the Royal Committee for the Preservation and Collection of National Antiquities of Den-mark and who first devised the ‘three-age system’, and his assistant at the National Museum of Denmark, Jens Jacob Asmussen Worsaae (1821–85), among the first to see the full potential of careful recording in excava-tion and to anticipate later palaeobotanical work (Daniel 1967: 80-81, 85-86; Gräslund 1987; Trigger 1989: 73-87). In Sweden, Sven Nilsson (1787–1883) adopted the ‘three-age system’ and applied it to the origins of hunting (Daniel 1967: 95, 103-105, 112-14; Trigger 1989: 80), while his compatriot Oscar Mon-telius (1843–1921) developed typological stud-ies (Daniel 1967: 112; Trigger 1989: 155-61). The pioneering work of Thomsen soon became a cornerstone of archaeological method and,

in Britain, one of its chief exponents was none other than Arthur Evans’s father, John (Hudson 1981; MacEnroe 1995: 3-5). Moreover, two of the most influential archaeologists in Britain, Sir John Lubbock (later Lord Avebury) and August Henry Pitt-Rivers, were close friends of John Evans and had influenced Arthur Evans in no small way. Both Lubbock and Pitt-Rivers were greatly influenced by another acquaint-ance of Sir John Evans: Charles Darwin (Dan-iel 1967: 225-33, 276; Trigger 1989: 197-99). This influence went deeper than a scholarly meeting of minds; it assumed an intimacy often overlooked. Lubbock grew up as a neighbor of Darwin, whose house bordered on the Lubbock family estate in Kent (Trigger 1989: 115), and Pitt-Rivers’s daughter was married to John Lubbock (Trigger 1989: 197). As a later mem-ber of parliament, Lubbock was instrumental in securing passage for an 1882 Act to provide for the protection of ancient monuments (Trigger 1989: 115). Moreover, as a banker and mem-ber of parliament, Lubbock’s business dealings brought him even closer to the wealthy indus-trialist, John Evans, than common scholarly interests alone could have done. This was a well-oiled and very active ‘old boys’ network. Against this backdrop, classical archaeol-ogy, already well-established, continued in its own habitual way and the only thing ‘archaeo-logical’ about it was the process of recovering Greek and Roman art. The so-called father of classical archaeology, Johann Joachim Winck-elmann (1717–68), was in reality the chief purveyor of nothing more than a very specific form of classical art history, a pseudo-dis-cipline in which the study of sculpture was deemed the most worthy and noble (March-and 1996: 7-16), particularly of naked boys and men (Potts 1994). This has been recently described as ‘the asceticism of Philhellenist Aesthetics’ (Marchand 1996: 7). It was a form of voyeurism in which ‘the eye’ and stylistic sensitivities were highly elevated, if not over-inflated. What certainly is over-inflated is



Winckelmann’s role in the history and devel-opment of archaeology. It is often forgotten that he was not without predecessors; so too that, by the mid-18th century, handbooks of Greek history in Europe were not rare items (Schnapp 1993). As Marchand concludes (1996: 7; cf. Schnapp 1993): ‘Winckelmann, then, hardly merits the exalted title Goethe later lavished upon him: Columbus to the undiscovered continent of the Greeks he was not’. It is ironic, furthermore, that as a student of classical Greek sculpture, Winckelmann, who had never visited Greece, had probably never seen a genuine work of Greek art of the high Classical period. The gentlemanly voyeurism of classical archaeology was upset, however, by a brash, wealthy banker and merchant, who with sin-gle-minded passion laid bare both Troy and Mycenae for the world to view. In so doing Heinrich Schliemann—an outsider to Alter-tumswissenschaft (Morris 1994: 25) and once described by Evans himself as the ‘Columbus’ of the science of classical antiquity (Evans 1901; quoted in Daniel 1967: 150)—by attempting to prove the validity of the Homeric epic, unwittingly forced classical philology and clas-sical archaeology to a new level of collabora-tion. Whatever one thinks of Schliemann’s methodology and expectations, he was the first to have uncovered prehistoric Greece by seeing what Vermeule (1996) described as ‘the dirt and the word’ as equal elements. However, whereas Schliemann’s discoveries forcefully showed that ancient mythology and epic poetry—the ‘word’—might be connected with historical events and actual places—the ‘dirt’—Evans’s achievement was that his exca-vations took him back before Schliemann’s protohistoric, Homeric Greece. In so doing, Evans ventured into a realm of interpreta-tion based, as noted above, purely on mate-rial and on his own imagination. His fertile imagination can be seen, for example, in the names he gave to parts of the ‘palace’—even

the very label of ‘palace’—such as the ‘Piano Nobile’, the ‘Queen’s Megaron’, the ‘Court of the Distaffs’, the ‘Loggia’, the ‘Warder’s Lodge’, the ‘Corridor of the Bays’, ‘The Hall of the Double Axes’ (so-called because of the mason’s marks), the ‘Temple Repositor-ies’, the ‘Caravanserai’, the ‘Temple Tomb’, the ‘Throne Room’ (the only throne room in Europe essentially in the basement of a build-ing), and so on. These names, although in many cases hypothetical and, more often than not, fanciful, inappropriate and misleading (Hood and Taylor 1981: 7; Zoes 1996), have passed into the jargon of Aegean prehistory to such an extant that Evans’s imagination is constantly enshrined and perpetuated. Central to Evans’s vision was the chronol-ogy of his Minoan culture and this in itself has assumed a die-hard tenacity. To be sure, there is a long and impressive list of scholars who did not subscribe to Evans’s chronologi-cal scheme, beginning with Wilhelm Dörpfeld as early as 1905 (Dörpfeld 1905; reaffirmed in Dörpfeld 1907; challenged, with spirit, by Mac-kenzie 1904–1905; 1905–1906; 1906–1907; 1907–1908), Åberg (1933: 138-47), and, most notably, Wace and Blegen (1918; 1939), all prior to World War II. In his 1936 review of The Palace of Minos IV (Evans 1935), Heurtley (1936) cogently remarked that the Knossos material would have to be entirely reorganized if it were to serve any archaeological value; he also compared Evans’s writing style to a Papal encyclical. In the Burlington Magazine of the following year, Wace (1937) noted that The Palace of Minos IV was not a modern scientific report, but rather a story told ‘in the grand manner of the eighteenth century’. After the war, the debate was taken up by established Minoanists, especially non-British, such as Levi (1959; 1960) and van Effenterre (1963), not to mention Leonard Palmer’s more spirited and sustained attacks (see below). Nicholas Platon’s chronologi-cal sub-divisions of Pre-, Proto-, Neo- and

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Post-Palatial, although widely accepted, are most often used in conjunction with Evans’s chronological scheme (Alexiou 1973: 7-8). Despite such eminent ‘disbelievers’, and a few modifications to Evans’s sequence, the basic tripartite scheme itself remains essen-tially unaltered. And Heurtley’s advice that the Knossos material would need to be com-pletely reorganized if it were to serve any archaeological value has not been heeded. A more recent and detailed critique of Evans’s chronology by Hentschel (1982) suc-cessfully brought to light the shortcomings of the scheme, by showing that Evans’s ‘mature’ vision conflicted dramatically with his early interpretation of the evidence. In her conclu-sion, Hentschel (1982: 294) states:

Most scholars assume the final report pro-vides an accurate presentation of the facts relevant to the chronology. But The Palace of Minos was written from two to three dec-ades after the major campaigns had taken place, at a time when the facts had necessar-ily become blurred in the mind of the exca-vator and supplanted by a vision of Cretan Unity and Supremacy in the Late Bronze Age Aegean. Many facts were pressed, and the archaeological record was made to con-form to the aristocratic vision of an island thalassocracy ruled by Priest Kings and Knossian Lords. According to Evans, this civilization progressed without interruption through successive stages of infancy, matu-rity, and decay and at the end of its Golden Age collapsed abruptly as a result of a natu-ral phenomenon. No other civilization ever gained hegemony over the Cretans.

Quite apart from the problems of the peren-nial tripartite system of chronology that has served Aegean prehistory so long, if not nec-essarily so well, Hentschel brings to the fore two crucial aspects. The first is the fundamen-tal differences between Evans’s early writings and his synthesis in The Palace of Minos. Even Mervyn Popham, one of Evans’s most loyal supporters, states that ‘on questions of fact

the Annual Reports are often more reliable [sc. than The Palace of Minos]’ (Popham 1970: 15; cf. Hentschel 1982: 294 n. 1). The aristocratic vision of an island thalas-socracy, of which Hentschel speaks, was, in many ways, precipitated by the Great War. In 1914 Europe exploded, and one of the result-ing casualties was the concept of 19th-century monarchy. Evans, now in his early seventies and confined to Youlbury, saw the demise of benevolent monarchy and retreated not only into the Victorian past of his childhood, but into an older, more mythical realm. The final ‘mature’ vision of his Minoans was painted in his study at Youlbury, far from the carnage of the Great War. The point is very well made by Horwitz (1981: 184):

Evans had conceived his great work not merely as a technical report for specialists but as the saga of a unique civilization, and he wrote with a literary eloquence not all archaeologists command. The task he had set himself was formidable: to give a sweep-ing chronological account of the Minoan civilization with the Palace of Knossos as its focus, but incorporating all the addi-tional evidence found by other archaeolo-gists working in Crete … The book changed as it grew. Writing The Palace of Minos was like trying to compose a mystery story with no preconceived plot.

Hentschel’s second point is more explicit: Evans’s firm belief in the priority of Crete and his conviction that no other civiliza-tion gained hegemony over his Minoans. This, too, was a retreat into the immediate past of Victorian England and the primacy of the British Empire. Evans could not bear to see his island culture destroyed by a more powerful civilization, particularly a main-land—Continental—one, and in having to come to grips with the inevitable collapse of Bronze Age Crete, Evans preferred a natural disaster: an act of God. Behind the romantic and idealistic vision of an invented society there lay a very real agenda.



On the very first page of the first volume of The Palace of Minos, Evans clearly outlines what he himself believed he found by stating:

The progressive revelations, from 1900 onwards, of a high early civilization on Cretan soil entailed the urgent necessity for devising a new system and terminol-ogy for the Later Prehistoric Age in the Aegean area. The term ‘Mycenaean’ no longer sufficed. The great Palaces at Knos-sos and Phaestos, the smaller but exquisitely appointed building of the same class at Hagia Triada, the town sites at Gournià and Palaikastro, island settlements like Pseira, the archaic mansions of Vasilikì, the cave sanctuaries of Psychro and Kamares, primi-tive ‘tholos’ ossuaries like those of Messarà, the early tombs of Mochlos and a further series of discoveries, to which each season adds, have brought forth a mass of materials not only showing us a contemporary culture, parallel with that of Mycenae, in its own home, but carrying the origins of that cul-ture stage beyond stage to an incomparably more remote period. For the first time there has come into view a primitive European civilization, the earliest phase of which goes back even beyond the days of the First Dynasty of Egypt… To this early civilization of Crete as a whole I have proposed—and the suggestion has been generally adopted by the archaeologists of this and other coun-tries—to apply the name ‘Minoan’. By the Greeks themselves the memory of the great Age that had preceded their own diffusion throughout the Aegean lands was summed up in the name of Minos (Evans 1921: 1).

Evans goes on to say that Minos was painted as an ogre by Athenian historians of the clas-sical period. This was not only a strong anti-classical stance; he was ready to defend his Minoans even in the face of classical Greek historians. He wrote (1921: 1):

It was, however, reserved for Athenian chauvinism so to exaggerate the tyranni-cal side of that early sea-dominion as to

convert the Palace of a long series of great rulers into an ogre’s den. But the fabulous accounts of the Minotaur and his victims are themselves expressive of a childish wonder at the mighty creations of a civili-zation beyond the ken of the new-comers. The spade of the excavator has indeed done much to explain and confute them. The ogre’s den turns out to be a peaceful abode of priest-kings, in some respects more modern in its equipments than any-thing produced by classical Greece.

Such anti-classical feelings did not erupt suddenly. A decade earlier Evans was pub-licly stating that the whole classical Greek civilization owed much of its inspiration to sources rooted in a far earlier, non-Greek—Minoan—past. As Horwitz (1981: 178) so nicely puts it: ‘With this pronouncement Evans completed his progression from the student at Oxford who had criticized the narrowly classical curriculum to the eminent archaeologist prepared to defend his theories against all challengers.’ More than its anti-classical sentiment, the divide in Aegean archaeology between Classical Archaeologists and Aegean Prehistorians has a prehistory that goes back, at least, to the early 20th century. Elsewhere Evans wrote:

The work of the spade had now brought out the essential underlying truth of the old traditions that made Knossos—the home of Minos and Daidalos—the most ancient centre of civilized life in Greece and with it, of our whole Continent. It may be confidently said indeed, that no equal plot of Earth’s surface has been productive in such various directions of so many unique records bearing on our earliest culture (Evans, apud Pendlebury 1935: 7-8).

Similar accounts date back to Evans’s early years at Knossos, and it seems that he had quickly established what it was that he had found. In a long article of 1901, quoted by Glyn Daniel (1967: 150-65), Evans begins

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with the following paragraph:

Less than a generation back the origin of Greek civilization, and with it the sources of all great culture that has ever been, were wrapped in an impenetrable mist. That ancient world was still girt round within its narrow confines by the circling ‘Stream of Ocean’. Was there anything beyond? The fabled kings and heroes of the Homeric Age, with their palaces and strongholds, were they aught, after all, but more or less humanized sun myths? (Evans 1901; Daniel 1967: 150).

In the same 1901 article, Evans (1901; cf. Daniel 1967: 151) went on to state:

Here, in his royal city of Knossos, ruled Minos, or whatever historic personage is covered by that name, and founded the first sea empire of Greece, extending his dominion far and wide over the Aegean isles and coastlands. Athens paid him his human tribute of youths and maidens. His colonial plantations extended east and west along the Mediterranean basin till Gaza worshipped the Cretan Zeus and a Minoan city rose in western Sicily. But it is as the first lawgiver of Greece that he achieved his greatest renown, and the Code of Minos became the source of all later legislation. As the wise ruler and inspired lawgiver there is something alto-gether biblical in his legendary character. He is the Cretan Moses, who every nine years repaired to the Cave of Zeus, whether on Cretan Ida or on Dicta, and received from the God of the Mountain the laws for his people. Like Abraham, he is described as the ‘friend of God’. Nay, in some accounts, the mythical being of Minos has a tendency to blend with that of his native Zeus.

Minos’s colonial plantations recall the Brit-ish Raj and the adage that the ‘sun never sets on the British Empire’. Further on, he wrote, as if to the tune of Rule Britannia:

The outer walls of the Palace were sup-ported on huge gypsum blocks, but there was no sign of an elaborate system of fortifi-

cation such as at Tiryns and Mycenae. The reason for this is not far to seek. Why is Paris strongly fortified, while London is practi-cally an open town? The city of Minos, it must be remembered, was the centre of a great sea power, and it was in ‘wooden walls’ that its rulers must have put their trust (Evans 1901; Daniel 1967: 156).

The ‘wooden walls’ mentioned by Evans refer directly to the passage in Herodotos VII. 143 in which the Athenians, at the time of the Persian invasion, interpreted the Delphic Oracle at the instigation of Themistokles, to mean the protective ‘wooden wall’ of their ships. And it is ironic that the ‘thalassoc-racy’ myth was invented by and for classical Athenian hegemony overseas (see above; for fortifications in Minoan Crete and the ‘myth of Minoan peace’, see Alexiou 1979). Evans’s work was not only widely read, but influential. In the Preface to his 1910 volume on The Sea-Kings of Crete, the Reverend James Baikie wrote:

The object aimed at in the following pages has been to offer the general reader a plain account of the wonderful investigations which have revolutionized all ideas as to the antiquity and the level of the earliest European culture, and to endeavour to make intelligible the bearing and signifi-cance of the results of these investigations [of Evans]. In the hope that the extraor-dinary resurrection of the first European civilization may appeal to a more extended constituency than that of professed students of ancient origins … (Baikie 1910: vii)

The above accounts are revealing, for they show that, although working in the Aegean, Evans moved away from classical archaeology and even from Mycenaean archaeology, and embraced a notion of the primacy of Europe in prehistory. He discovered an important site and used it to invent a European civilization as early as, or even earlier than, the great empires of Egypt and the Near East. Further-



more, this was a civilization more ‘modern’ than anything produced by classical Greece, and it was this modernity that appealed to a Europe itself at the brink of modernity. Europe in prehistory was no longer the domain of wild heathens, as certain scholars, and even some politicians of the Victorian era, such as Benjamin Disraeli, had previously assumed. I refer here to the well-known speech of Dis-raeli with regard to Jerusalem:

I can still remember that olive-crowned plain, that sunset crag, that citadel famed of ineffable beauty! That was a brilliant civilization developed by a gifted race more than 2,000 years ago: at a time when the ancestors of the manufacturers of Man-chester, who now clothe the world, were themselves covered with skins and tattoos like the red men of the wilderness (quoted in Weintraub 1993: 229).

The reference to English clothing manufactur-ers assumes a more immediate poignancy—per-haps more apparent than real—since Evans’s family fortune, though not in textiles, was in paper manufacturing (Brown 1993: 11). Dis-raeli’s ‘red men of the wilderness’ recalls, in an uncanny way, Evans’s remark, cited above, in which he refers to ‘Red Indians’ in a similarly derogatory way (Evans 1908: 9). It is worth adding that Disraeli’s speeches, and especially his novels, are filled with references to Juda-ism. Evans’s reference (cited above), for exam-ple, to Minos as the Cretan version of Moses coincides with one of Disraeli’s most famous speeches, in which he noted that ‘God had revealed himself to only one race, the Jews: the greatest of legislators (Moses): the greatest of administrators (Solomon), and the greatest of reformers (Christ): what race, extinct or living, can produce three such men as these?’ (quoted in Roth 1952: 72; also 57-95 on Disraeli, Judaism and the Jews). In Victorian England these were powerful words spoken by one who, as leader of the Conservative Party, was to become Her Majesty’s Prime Minister.

Evans’s quest was to establish that there was now a civilization equal to, perhaps ‘superior’ to others. Despite the fact that Crete—like Great Britain—was a long and narrow island located just off the European continent, and thus not quite Europe, here was the gen-esis—or dawn—of a very real form of European prehistory: an idea of Europe with all of its assumptions of priority and antiquity. This was a vision that harked back to, and significantly built upon, the earlier work of John Lubbock. A Europe, particularly a northwest Europe lacking a high early civilization, and filled with wild heathens was embarrassing to many and not least to Adolf Hitler; in an often-cited pas-sage, he exclaimed:

Why do we call the whole world’s atten-tion to the fact that we have no past? It isn’t enough that the Romans were erecting great buildings when our forefathers were still living in mud huts; now Himmler is enthusing over every potsherd and stone axe he finds. All we prove by that is that we were still throwing stone hatchets and crouching around open fires when Greece and Rome had already reached the highest stage of culture. We really should do our best to keep quiet about this past … The present-day Romans must be having a laugh at these revelations (cited by Speer 1970: 94-95).

In Evans’s vision, the diversity of Europe, with all its microclimates, microenvironments, local economies, its complex dialectology and toponymy and its provincial particularism (cf. Braudel 1986), was swept to one side. In this sense, Evans’s vision was of a culture—a ‘Proto-European’ culture—that never was (cf. Zoes 1996). At the very center of all these notions lay the concrete remains of a building (or buildings), which was to serve as the spiritual and physical focus of a created culture. Numerous volumes and papers have addressed the question of what, exactly, is a Minoan ‘palace’ (Hägg and Marinatos 1987; Myers et al. 1992: 124-47;

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also Hägg and Marinatos 1984; see further Graham 1962; Cadogan 1976; Shaw 1971; Castleden 1990; 1991 [reviewed by Bennet 1992–93]; for the difficulties of correctly iden-tifying anything at Knossos, see the debate in Hood 1985). Nevertheless, Evans’s achieve-ment was far greater than giving the world a previously unknown culture. Perhaps his most enduring legacy, physically if not spiritually, is the concrete reality of Knossos itself.

The Vision Made Concrete: The Palace of Minos in the 20th and 21st Centuries

In the early 20th century, Evans not only dug the so-called palace site, he went on to publish in detail the results of his excavations (see Evans 1899–1900; 1900–1901; 1901–1902; 1902–1903; 1903–1904; 1904–1905; 1921; 1928; 1930; 1935; Evans and Evans 1936) and, in the process, gave birth to the term ‘Minoan culture’. More than this, Evans took a bold step that no archaeologist before him, and very few after him, even dared to contemplate, let alone carry through to such an extent. He transformed the monument, through recon-struction and restoration—or ‘reconstitution’ as he himself preferred (Evans 1927; Farnoux 1993: 35-93)—beyond what the preserved remains reasonably permitted (Figures 5–11). By doing much more than replacing fallen architectural blocks, he constructed, in rein-forced concrete, his own idea of what the pal-ace site might have looked like in its heyday. The most radical period of reconstruction was between 1922 and 1930, and it was during this time that the site was transformed from poorly preserved ruins into a multi-storied concrete vision of the past (Papadopoulos 1997; Hitch-cock and Koudounaris 2002). Reinforced concrete—beton armée—became for Evans a panacea. Newly invented, strong and sup-ple, and above all modern, it was to be the technological tool that gave Evans’s vision of the past substance in the present, despite the

fact that it was a material alien to the original fabric of the monument (Papadopoulos 1997; for technical studies on the conservation of concrete, see, among others, Brachert 1991; Makropoulos et al. 1988; Moraiti and Chris-taras 1992; Papageorgakis and Boskos 1988: 649-59). Before condemning Evans, however, for tampering with the past in such a largely irreversible way, it is useful to consider what might have happened to the exposed ruins if he had taken no action whatsoever. It is a reality that the more recent excavations at Knossos, among numerous other sites in the Mediterranean in the past few decades, exposed—some fully published—but never conserved or consolidated, are suffering and decaying at an astonishing pace. This in itself raises many issues, including the fact that Evans’s restoration, although repre-senting an amalgam of various Minoan phases, not only disregards earlier and later remains at the site, such as the Neolithic, Early Iron Age, Classical, Hellenistic and Roman, but actively hides them from view (Papadopoulos 1997). Even the antiquities beyond the immediate area of the ‘palace’ that were chosen for res-toration and preservation—areas that are not open to the public—were Minoan. Although excavations in the area of the site beyond the immediate palace were initiated by Hogarth (1899–1900), much of the excavation and restoration of the area was conducted by Evans himself (see, in addition to The Palace of Minos, Evans 1911–14; for a survey of the Knossos area, see Hood and Smyth 1981: 6-15; for bibliography of work conducted in this area, see Myers et al. 1992: 142-43; see also Evely et al. 1994; 1996; Popham et al. 1984). Another issue is that Knossos, like so many other sites, represents one of the most promi-nent, long-term projects of a foreign archaeo-logical school in Greece, but the responsibility for the conservation and maintenance of the site since 1951 has fallen to the national archaeological service (Papadopoulos 1997).



Figure 5. View from the east of the settlement mound of Knossos in 1902, taken only two years after Evans started his excavations. The Throne Room has been roofed, a retaining wall for the Central Court was built, and various parts of the Domestic Quarter were partly consolidated. (Photograph courtesy of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.)

Figure 6. Knossos, the Throne Room during excavation, 1900. Note the poor state of preservation. This photo-graph, touched up with white ink, was published as the main illustration of a special brochure issued by the Cretan Exploration Fund in 1900. (Photograph courtesy of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.)

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Figure 7. Interior (a) and exterior (b) view of the Throne Room complex after restoration in 1930. The new con-crete structure was laid directly onto the original fabric of the monument and the restoration is dramatic in the degree to which it transformed the excavated remains of the area. (Photographs courtesy of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.)

a)

b)



A useful account of the transactions leading to the offer of the Evans estate at Knossos to the Greek Government was published in an article by Sir John Myres (1951). Apart from the area of Minoan Knossos excavated and in part restored by Evans (about seven acres), the estate included the Villa Ariadne. In 1926, at the age of 75, Evans transferred all his per-sonal rights to the palace, the Villa Ariadne and the Knossos estate to the British School of Archaeology at Athens, with the necessary assent of the Greek Government. In addi-tion to income from the estate (wine, olives, oil and grain), Evans established securities toward the maintenance of the site, as well as the endowment of a curator. This was in part funded by Evans’s sale of his personal collec-tion of coins to ‘a Cambridge man’ in 1926 for some £18,000; the sale was widely reported in the press of 20 September 1926 (see, e.g., the Glasgow Daily and the Daily Despatch). It was hoped that the arrangements of 1926 would provide for all emergencies, with a total estimate endowment of £350 per year. Until 1941 the endowment was supplemented by the income from the Knossos estate, but dur-ing the Second World War the estate fell out of cultivation, and growing costs in the period immediately after the war made it impossible for the British School to maintain its activities at Knossos. In 1951, the Managing Committee of the British School—‘not without some sentimen-tal regret’ (as stated by Myres)—proposed to the Greek Government, through the British Embassy in Athens, and with the necessary concurrence of the Foreign Office, to hand over the palace with the villa and the freehold estate held in trust for its maintenance. The offer was accepted by the Greek Government on the centenary of Evans’s birth and, since 1951, the Greek Archaeological Service has been entirely responsible for the conserva-tion and maintenance of Knossos. Among other things, Myres states: ‘The visitors’ fees

imposed by the Greek Government went to the Department of Antiquities, not to the school’. Myres here implies that the British School could have maintained the site if it had income from visitors’ fees. Whatever one thinks of Evans’s interven-tion, he at least had the foresight to do something about the preservation of what he excavated. In this he was well ahead of his time, for he also appreciated the important difference between an ‘archaeological site’ and a ‘tourist attraction’. Indeed, the whole question of what might have survived at the site had Evans done nothing is perhaps best summed up in a statement, made with refer-ence to the excavations of the ‘palace’ at Phaistos, by the Italian anthropologist Angelo Mosso as early as 1907:

Within a century the palaces of Phaestos will exist no longer, and the ruins will only be seen in books. These witnesses of primaeval civilization are inevitably con-demned to disappear; everything even to the last vestige will crumble to dust and be dispersed by the wind, or will be dissolved into mud, which the rivulets of rain will carry far off to trouble the waters of the river… In a few years’ time nothing will remain but a limestone skeleton; the alabas-ter stairs will be destroyed, the decoration of the pavements and the incrustation of the walls will have vanished… In perplexity we watch the ruin of the ruins. The clouds and the sun will devour the sacred relics of that civilization which was the mother of our own. The vision of these remains brought back to the light has been like a flower which has bloomed unexpectedly to show us the beauty and perfume of pre-Hel-lenic art—it will disappear sadly, inevitably, but its fragrance, its fruitful germs will last beyond the limits of time (Mosso 1907: 66-68).

Although influenced by his collaborators, the bold decision to ‘reconstitute’ the palace was made by Evans. In a paper read before the

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Figure 8. The poorly preserved Domestic Quarter, viewed from the east in 1901 after excavation and early con-solidation. The photograph shows, from left to right: the Hall of the Double Axes, part of the stairs lead-ing to the upper East-West Corridor, and the Lobby of the Wooden Posts. (Photograph courtesy of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.)

Figure 9. View from above west of the Domestic Quarter, including the Hall of the Double Axes and the Queen’s Megaron, after stabilization and partial consolidation, largely achieved with the use of wooden supports, in 1902. (Photograph courtesy of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.)



Figure 10. As Figure 9, showing the restored upper story of the Domestic Quarter in 1928. The roof over the lower story shown in Figure 9 was built of reinforced concrete. (Photograph courtesy of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.)

Figure 11. The North Lustral Basin viewed from the north-west, as restored in 1929. (Photograph courtesy of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.)

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Society of Antiquaries in London in 1926, he set forth his reasons for the restoration (Evans 1927). His reconstructions aroused much controversy at the time, and have continued to do so ever since. Contemporary criticisms of Evans’s work appeared in his own 1927 publication (Evans 1927: 266-67; see also Graham 1962: 26; Karo 1959: 18, 24-26; Picard 1932). Despite the reactions, however, Evans’s ‘reconstitutions’ were among the first of their type, and prior to his interventions at Knossos, no other archaeological site saw such a level of reconstruction. This is well stated in Evans’s own words (Evans 1927: 258):

Although in the work of conservation and reconstitution of upper stories new lines have been recently struck out at Pompeii, at Ostia, and elsewhere, it may be fairly said that they have followed the example already set on the site of Knossos, where the work has now proceeded with successively improving methods for twenty-six years.

The ‘improving methods’ refer to the fact that ‘Knossos … has passed through three “periods” of conservation—marked respectively by the use of wooden supports, of iron girders, and of ferro-concrete’ (Evans 1927: 262; Papadopou-los 1997). A general view of the mound of Knossos taken in 1902 shows clearly how much of the site was excavated in the first three seasons (Figure 5). One of the earliest and most impor-tant discoveries of the first season, the Throne Room, presented problems of conservation from the start. The first roofing solution was completed in 1901 as a matter of urgency, and this was soon replaced by a sturdier structure erected in 1904 (Papadopoulos 1997: 103-104, figs. 7-8). The latter was finally replaced, in 1930, by the concrete structure standing today (Papadopoulos 1997: 104-105, figs. 9-12); a comparison of what the area of the Throne Room looked like as first exposed by excavation (Figure 6), with the reconstruc-tions of 1930 (Figure 7a-b), shows the level

of Evans’s intervention. The same is true for other parts of the site, including the general area of the so-called Domestic Quarter (Fig-ures 8–10). Here, the poorly preserved ruins (Figure 8) were first consolidated, in 1902, with wooden supports and, slightly later, with iron girders (Figure 9), but completely rebuilt in reinforced concrete by 1928 (Figure 10). The North Entrance Passage was similarly rebuilt in 1930, using reinforced concrete; so too the North Lustral Basin (completed in 1929; Figure 11) and the West Court façade. Although all of Evans’s reconstructions were complete by 1930, with many of them in place a number of years earlier, he had already grap-pled with the dilemma of preserving the exca-vated remains as early as 1900 (Papadopoulos 1997). This coincided with the publication in 1903 of Alois Riegl’s essay Der moderne Denk-malkultus, sein Wesen, seine Entstehung, reis-sued in 1929, almost a quarter-century after his death, in Gesammelte Aufsätze, and trans-lated into English as ‘The Modern Cult of Monuments’ (Riegl 1903; the page references given here refer to the English edition). In an uncanny way, modern art-history and tradi-tional archaeology not only intersected, they collided at the brink of modernity over the subject of the role of the historical monument in the modern world. In his paper Riegl broke new ground in dis-cussing the modern cult of monuments. For Riegl, Denkmalkult implied much more than the simple ‘preservation’ of monuments. He begins by discussing ‘intentional’ and ‘unin-tentional’ (or historical) monuments, both of which have commemorative value; in the case of the ‘intentional’, commemorative value is determined by the creator, whereas the commemorative value of the ‘unintentional’ is determined by the viewer in the present. Riegl proceeds by comparing the ‘historical’ value inherent in the 19th century, with the ‘age’ value of the 20th century. He writes: ‘If the 19th century was the age of histori-



cal value, then the 20th century appears to be that of age-value’ (Riegl 1903: 29). This was a direct contrast between the specifics of 19th-century appreciation of historical value and the urge to give this value legal protec-tion, on the one hand, with the universals of the 20th century, on the other. Riegl states (1903: 38):

Age-value appreciates the past for itself, while the historical value singles out one moment in the developmental continuum of the past and places it before our eyes as if it belonged to the present. Intentional commemorative value aims to preserve a moment in the consciousness of later gen-eration.

The result is that historic monuments begin to assume a cult role in the present, or in recent times, which according to Riegl was destined for conflict with ‘modern art’, yet, at the same time, influenced the perception of ‘art’ in general. Riegl also tackled the relationship between present-day values and the cult of monuments and in so doing he introduced the notions of ‘use-value’ and ‘art-value’, both of which are in conflict with ‘age-value’. Use-value is practical and advocates preser-vation and maintenance on an essentially economic basis, even prescribing demolition when circumstances make it necessary. Art-value is subject to the modern Kunstwollen and is, therefore, further subject to diachronic change. Under art-value, Riegl discusses ‘rela-tive art-value’, and ‘newness-value’. These are useful terms since they better define art-value, and prescribe the preservation of a monument only if it appears new or if some aspect of it appeals to the modern Kunstwollen. It is against such a backdrop that the Art Nouveau aspects of Evans’s reconstructions at Knossos should be borne in mind. For Riegl, age-value and newness-value are superficial. They are visually perceived, often determined by surface appearance, and appeal directly to

the emotions. These are values that belong to everyone: to the masses. Historical value and relative art-value, on the other hand, demand knowledge and reflection, qualities of the élite, and particularly of art-historians. Riegl developed and discussed his detailed analysis of the motivations underlying the conservation of any historical monument, but he never openly judged between the opposing sets of values used in deciding the fate of a monument, nor did he ever state how he would proceed in such a decision. Paradoxically, Riegl sees his own time, the turn of the century, as ‘a period of transition, which is naturally also one of struggle’ (Riegl 1903: 29). It is against the background of this ‘transition’ or ‘struggle’ that Evans’s achieve-ment assumes a sharper perspective. Whereas Riegl, in the great tradition of 19th- and early 20th-century art history, theorized, Evans actually did. He transformed a ‘shapeless pile of rubble’ (cf. Riegl 1903: 33). The result was not ‘picturesque ruins’, nor a replica (such as that of the Parthenon on a grassy knoll in Nashville, Tennesee), nor the ‘imprisonment of art’ in a museum. It was something that did not exist at the time Riegl wrote Der moderne Denkmalkultus. The palace at Knossos as restored by Evans is neither new nor old. It commemorates one man’s vision of a culture and a people. In all of this, there is a rejection of modernity on Evans’s part and a retreat into a mythical past that exists in the present by the sheer strength of reinforced concrete. Evans was the first to use archaeological remains as a medium of personal, interpretative and per-manent expression. In the London Times for 31 October 1905, he wrote:

The result achieved by this legitimate proc-ess of reconstitution is such that it must appeal to the historic sense of the most unimaginative. To a height of over 25 feet there rise before us the Grand Staircase and columnar hall of approach practically

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unchanged since they were traversed 3½ millenniums [sic] back by kings and queens of Mino’s [sic] stock on their way to the more private quarters of the Royal house-hold. We have here all the materials for the reconstruction of a brilliant picture of that remote epoch.

As noted above, prior to 1900 the legendary Minos was known only from later references in Greek literature and art; neither his ‘pal-ace’, nor the culture that was to bear his name, was known. By 1935—the year of Evans’s last visit to Knossos and date of publication of the fourth and final volume of his The Palace of Minos (Evans 1935)—the name of this mythi-cal king was not only well-established, but applied to one of the most archaeologically visible prehistoric cultures of Europe and a culture well-known to the popular imagina-tion. In 1900 the site on the Kephala hill was just another prehistoric site; by 1935 it was internationally known as the Palace of Minos. In 1900 there were no Minoans; by 1935 they were established as the earliest civilization of Europe. Moreover, Minos’s ‘seat-of-power’ was trans-formed into one of the most frequently visited archaeological sites in the Old World (visitor statistics are presented and discussed in Papa-dopoulos 1997: 100-101). Indeed, the problem of the future maintenance of the site, particu-larly in the light of the increase of visitors, was deemed serious enough to warrant mention by Myres as early as 1951:

Growing suburbs of Herakleion (formerly Candia) are already within walking dis-tance; a vast sanitorium will soon break the skyline; while restaurants, cafés, and shacks, with nocturnal radio, occupy adjacent free-holds which the school cannot afford to buy out. At week-ends and festivals, which are frequent in Crete, the palace is thronged by hundreds of local visitors, many of whom regard it rather as a recreation ground than an ancient site, and need supervision if damage is to be avoided (Myres 1951: 7).

The fact that the site of Knossos was ‘thronged by hundreds of local visitors’ already in 1951, a figure which was to be transformed into the hundreds of thousands by the 1990s, shows very clearly that Evans’s interventions were popular with the public. The majority of peo-ple visiting the site of Knossos today continue to express sympathy and approval for Evans’s interventions, despite the fact that certain details, such as the position of many of the frescoes and the number of floors in certain parts of the monument, are clearly wrong. The Dolphin Fresco, for example, restored above the door of the ‘Queen’s Megaron’ has been relocated by Koehl (1986), as a floor fresco from the story above. Elsewhere, the various phases of the reconstruction of the ‘Stepped Portico’, south of the ‘Throne Room’, that led up from the ‘Central Court’ to the upper floor, were recorded in a series of photographs dat-ing from 1904 through 1930 (see Brown 1983: pls. 25-27). In addition to the steps leading to the upper floor, an alleged further flight gave access to a second floor or the roof. With regard to the latter, Brown (1983: 42; cf. Hitchcock and Koudounaris 2002: 42, fig. 3.1) states: ‘Mackenzie thought, probably wrongly, that two slabs forming a “seat” in the “Room of the Chariot Tablets” were steps from here’. Thus, even the number of floors restored in concrete in certain parts of the palace was wrong (for other misplaced or misidentified frescoes, see Immerwahr 1990: 84-99, esp. 86-87). In a recent reconstruction of the so-called palace at Knossos, Allan Klynne has rejected the multi-storied reconstructions of, among oth-ers, F.G. Newton, Piet de Jong, R.F. Zallinger, N. Gouvoussis, and that by G. Lappas and J. Sardelli, and presented his own much simpli-fied proposed reconstruction (Klynne 1998: 223, fig. 9, with cogent responses by Driessen 1999; Hitchcock 1999; Molyneaux 1999). Furthermore, some parts of the palace were restored on the basis of fragmentary, and per-haps little understood, Minoan iconography,



whereas others were restored in the light of the architectural fashion of the day. This is most noticeable in the area of, and around, the restored ‘Throne Room’ (Figures 6–7), as well as the North Lustral Basin (Figure 11), which today represent some of the finest examples of Art Nouveau and Art Deco architecture in modern Greece. As for Minoan fresco painting, this was cogently compared by Sir Kenneth Clark to Art Nouveau and the style dix-neuf cent (Lapatin 2002: 134). Although Evans’s expressed aim (1927: 258) was to preserve the record of the upper floors of the building revealed in the process of exca-vation, the use to which some of the restored upper stories were put was not always commen-surate with ancient practice. A good example of this is the ‘picture gallery’ above the ‘Throne Room’, itself an entirely modern upper story, used for displaying replicas of frescoes from various parts of the palace. Despite these prob-lems of accuracy, even the falsification of the archaeological record, most specialists appreci-ate the complexity of arriving at solutions that succeed in preserving the excavated remains and also convey an idea of the original form and function of the building (Papadopoulos 1997; Stanley Price and Sullivan 1995: 128). The popularity of the site is an important issue that archaeologists and historians all too often forget. Quite apart from the consider-able interest in the site shown by Aegean prehistorians, Knossos, and more particularly the Bronze Age ‘palace’, has current relevance from many different perspectives. The palace means one thing for an Oxbridge graduate preparing a study on some aspect of the mate-rial record of the site, and quite another to the owner of a local taverna or taxi driver, whose living is earned from the numerous visitors to the site. Knossos, like any archaeological site, has a multiplicity of values (Stanley Price 1990: 285-87). Its actual value is not archaeo-logical, since archaeology is the method by which the cultural and informational signifi-

cance is accessed (Stanley Price and Sullivan 1995). The importance of the site extends to its role in the local, national and popular image, as well as its strong economic impact on the region. I have discussed some of the values elsewhere (Papadopoulos 1997), but it would be useful to enumerate here a few of the more salient. As a place associated with a hitherto unknown prehistoric civilization, Knossos has strong historical value. It represents one of the earliest complex societies in Europe, with abundant evidence of advanced technology and foreign relations. Knossos has yielded the earliest syllabic script in the Aegean and Europe (Linear A), as well as the earliest veri-fied written Greek (Linear B). Furthermore, Knossos is the earliest and largest Neolithic site on Crete (J.D. Evans 1964; 1971; 1994; Warren et al.1968), and one of the earliest permanent settlements in any of the Mediter-ranean islands (Cherry 1981; 1990; Brood-bank and Strasser 1991); yet these important remains are completely hidden from view. One commentator (Broodbank 1992: 39) working on Neolithic Crete stated: ‘When Sir Arthur Evans divided early Cretan prehistory between a New Stone Age and an Early Minoan precur-sor of the later palaces, he laid down a distinc-tion that still colours the way we think about the island’s Neolithic’. The site continued as an important urban nucleus in the Early Iron Age (Brock 1957; Coldstream 1973; 1991), Classical, Hellenis-tic and Roman periods (Sackett et al. 1992; papers in Evely et al. 1994). This historical significance—whether real or invented—has given the site great scientific value as the type-site for ‘Minoan’ culture and one of the cornerstones for the traditional chronol-ogy of the Aegean and parts of the eastern Mediterranean (Warren and Hankey 1989). Moreover, the palace and its surrounds have been the object of prolific scholarly research, and the site has launched many careers in

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archaeology, history, philology, art history and anthropology. The symbolic and associative values, which have defied the passage of time, are largely the result of Knossos as the topos for many myths. So although Minoan Knossos was lost from view, it had not been entirely lost from human memory. Pasiphaë, the Minotaur, and Daida-los’s many devices and creations, including the Labyrinth, and his subsequent human-powered flight from Crete with his ill-fated son Ikaros, were well-known in classical Greek tragedy, as they were in Greek, Roman and even modern tradition and iconography (S.P. Morris 1992a; Farnoux 1993). So too were Ariadne, Theseus and his slaying of the Minotaur (Papadopoulos 1997: 98). Although myth-historical, these traditions add to the allure and significance of the site, and it is perhaps no coincidence that some of the earliest modern travelers to Crete were most interested in the legendary Laby-rinth of Daidalos (for bibliography on modern travelers, see Pashley 1837; Spratt 1865; Hood and Taylor 1981; Hood and Smyth 1981; Far-noux 1993: 13-21). The modern activities on the site, especially Evans’s interventions, have enhanced the aesthetic value of Knossos, which most attracts and affects visitors to the site. Not least among these activities are the trees Evans planted around the palace in order to create a green-zone. The trees and shrubs framing the primary entrance to the ‘palace’ were planted in such a way as to create a tunnel of sorts, as if the visitor was descending into the pit of an excavated site. Within such a setting, Evans’s restoration of the palace, whatever its accu-racy, conveys an idea of the original building, and the reaction of most visitors to it is sym-pathetic, if not favorable (Stanley Price and Sullivan 1995). Indeed, the aesthetic value of the site in its greater landscape is enhanced by its symbolic/associative values. Quite apart from the site, there are the aesthetic qualities of many of the finds, such as the frescoes, and

floral and marine pottery motifs. The latter, as Bammer (1990) has discussed, have had a profound effect on the art and architecture of the earlier 20th century, particularly in the Art Nouveau (Jugendstil) and Art Deco move-ments of Europe and North America, which in turn influenced the restored versions of the original remains. In Modern Greece, the influ-ence of Evans’s restoration on 20th-century architecture was even more direct and blatant (Figure 12). Furthermore, the site of Knossos means many things to people living in Greece today. The social value of the site is reflected in Knos-sos as an undeniable source of national, and especially Cretan pride (Papadopoulos 1997: 99). The recognizability of the restored parts of the palace, and especially that of many of the finds, such as frescoes, bronzes, motifs on pottery and other media, has led to their use in a variety of modern products ranging from souvenirs to emblems of major shipping com-panies (Figure 13). Perhaps more so than any other archaeo-logical monument in the Mediterranean, the restoration of the palace at Knossos, as distinct from the original building, has developed its own historical identity. In 1994, the site saw 700,000 visitors, a conservative figure representing a minimum number of visitors, making Knossos the second-most visited site in Greece after the Athenian Acropolis, and one of the most frequented archaeological sites in the world (Papadopoulos 1997). A decade later, the number of visitors is probably in excess of one million. The site therefore represents an important economic resource, both on a national level, through intake at the gate, and on a local level. The effects of mass tourism trickle down to all aspects of the local economy, ranging from tourist agencies, large hotels and shipping companies, to taxi-driv-ers, restaurant and storeowners. Knossos today is much more than just an archaeological site and the preserve of a handful of rarefied



Figure 12. A Minoan villa at Philothei, Athens, built in the 1930s (AD) by architect Zoumboulides. The white col-umns shown in the photographs were later painted in ‘Minoan’ colors. (Photographs courtesy of Clairy Palyvou and M. Papaioannou of the Syllogos Prostasias Perivallontos Philothei [Society for the Protec-tion of the Environment of Philothei].)

Figure 13. The so-called ‘Priest King’ fresco, as reconstructed by Gilliéron, used as the company logo for Minoan Lines. (Official Minoan Lines postcard of the ship Festos Palace.)

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archaeologists. For all this, we have Arthur Evans to blame or thank. By giving the world a popular, money-making tourist venue, Evans assured posterity for his vision, and this vision was to have a life of its own well after he gave it concrete reality in the present.

Modernity and the Afterlife of the Vision: The Dawn of European Civilization

The work of Evans proved to be very influen-tial, both in the scholarly and public domains. In 1935 Pendlebury stated (1935: 10; see also Farnoux 1993: 95-112): ‘The excavation of the Palace of Minos at Knossos is one of the most important historical events of the century’. This sentiment is today reflected by the fact that the greater area of Knossos has been the subject of a prolific expenditure of scholarly energy and activity. This is well stated by Hood and Smyth (1981: 1): ‘Perhaps no other region of ancient settlement in Greece has been so thoroughly explored as this area of some 10 square kilometres’. But it was not just scholars who flocked to gaze at the remarkable discov-eries unearthed by Evans. On 13 July 1928, the Daily Mail newspaper, on the occasion of the publication of Harry Reginald Hall’s book The Civilization of Greece in the Bronze Age (Hall 1928), ran a feature story, illustrating one of the Minoan ‘snake goddesses’ entitled ‘The mystery of Minos: Feminist society before Moses’ day’. The opening paragraph reads:

It is extraordinary to learn, on the strength of the latest research and the most recent excavations, that there was in the Mediter-ranean island of Crete more than three thousand years ago, before the traditional date of Moses and while the Jews were still in their Egyptian captivity, a feminist civi-lization in which women were the equals of men or something more.

The same story is home to some of the most memorable statements ever made on Minoan society. For example:

When we look at the sanitary arrange-ments or the culture of its ladies and their customs, too; the obvious human rela-tions of ‘society’ between men and women unknown to later Greece and Rome; the unconventionality of its art at its best period… We might almost fancy that we are looking not at an ancient art at all, but at some ultra-modern art of the future.

Although the article illustrates a Minoan ‘snake goddess’ with bared breasts (Figure 14), not exactly the sort of dress one would expect to encounter in England at the time, the storyline reads:

One of the extraordinary characteristics of it is the modern appearance of its women’s dress, as in the garb of the snake goddess illustrated. They almost look as if they had stepped out of some early or mid-Victorian fashion plate: ‘The apparent modernity of Minoan society’, says Dr. Hall, ‘has often been remarked…’

The article ends:

How and why this Cretan Empire fell—an Empire based on sea power like our own—is still obscure. Some have suggested a prehistoric Bolshevik movement. But sud-denly all record of the Minoans vanishes from Egyptian monuments; their cities per-ish; and their name lives only in tradition, though as they pass into the twilight of the ages they hand down to Athens and the later generations a precious legacy of love for beauty and aesthetic sense.

Similar accounts and reports abound, par-ticularly in the years before World War II. History was being rewritten for the popular presses and venerable institutions were spend-ing fortunes on acquiring the modernity—often forged—of Cretan art (Butcher and Gill 1993; Lapatin 2000; 2002), such as the figurine in the Royal Ontario Museum (Fig-ure 15). Indeed, archaeology was to become the Ariadne which ‘furnished the clue’ to what lies at the root of Hellenic Civilization



Figure 14. Minoan faience ‘Snake Goddess’ composed of fragments from the ‘Temple Repositories’ at Knossos and fragments dating to the 20th century AD: a) as restored; b) drawing showing what is ancient and what is modern. Note that the head, neck, most of the beret-like headdress, the left arm and snake, as well as half of the right snake are all modern restorations. (After Evans 1921: 503, fig. 361.)

a) b)

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(The Times, 5 November 1900 [quoted in Brown 1983: 35]; see further Burrows 1907; Hawes and Hawes 1909). As Farnoux (1993: 100-101) has stressed, the popular press was not restricted to the Illustrated London News and other English-language presses, but extended to French and Italian large-distri-bution presses, such as Le Tour du Monde, the Gazette des Beaux-Arts and the Illustrazione italiana, to mention only a few. One headline, run by the American Weekly, on 13 Novem-ber 1922, read: ‘Jazz, Corsets and Bathtubs in Old Knossos 5000 Years Ago’. As Farnoux (1993: 101) elaborates: ‘ “Le Beau Conte de la Crète ancienne”, “L’Empire évanoui”, “Le Sol inépuisable de Crète” ou “Minos était-il juif?” sont quelques-uns des titres de la presse

internationale, d’Athènes à Melbourne et de Genève à New York.’ In the Referee for 15 July 1928, part of the storyline reads:

We begin to see that almost all of our present European culture must have sprung from the efflorescence of humanity in this small island… We know, for instance, that our old friends, the Philistines, were just a Cre-tan colony which had adopted the Semitic form of writing… One of the most astonish-ing things about them [the Minoans] is the dress of their ladies. At one period it seems to have been almost exactly that of the ’eighties, while in another a crinoline, prac-tically indistinguishable from that affected by our grandmothers, was the favorite wear… Everything goes to show that in this

Figure 15. Minoan ivory and gold figurine made sometime in the earlier 20th century AD and dubbed ‘Our Lady of the Sports’, who just happens to be wearing what looks remarkably like a penis sheath. Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, inv. 931.21.1 (after Evans 1935: pl. frontispiece.)



almost incredibly ancient civilization the women were more nearly the equals of the men than they have ever been until to-day, and there is some reason to think that they even served as combatants with the fighting forces by sea and land. At any rate we are fairly sure that they lived on such terms of comradeship with the other sex as we have hardly attained to even now.

The following excerpts, penned by Mona Gordon, were published in The Times for 6 December 1924:

But now within the last 20 years or so the magician, in the person of Sir Arthur Evans, has made those ‘impossible’ fairy legends come true by finding a solid historical basis for their existence behind the veil of nearly 4000 years. Trailing their broken wings those mythical tales came down to us through all those ages, and at last we recognise in the Minoan civilization of Crete—the oldest in Europe—a fact more wonderful than any which the fancy has woven… Imagine a great palace gleaming white in the sunshine, with broad stairways, courtyards, and laby-rinthine passages, and most wonderful of all, perhaps, an underground system of drainage as perfect as any construction of modern engineers… It is almost impossible to realise a European civilization which carries us back so far, at least 4000 years, for we, who have been accustomed to regard the siege of Troy and the Mycenaean Age as the begin-ning of things, have now to cast our minds back into a hitherto undreamed of time, when men wrote and thought and built, and women wore shady hats and crinolines ere ever Helen of Troy fled from Sparta! It is an amazing, an almost incredible, field of wonder and beauty which the discovery of this so-called ‘Minoan’ civilization has opened up…

Gordon’s characterization of Evans as the magician, who has made impossible fairy legends come true, is a metaphor all too appropriate. Two years later Dilys Powell, in Cassel’s Weekly of 2 June 1926, wrote:

The indication of a drinking trough, the corn bins and stable-like cobbling of the basements, the polished cement floors of the rooms above, so convenient to swab out, are all so many features designed for the convenience of man and beast, and include arrangements in keeping with a modern ‘hydro’, writes Sir Arthur. It is touching to note the Pavilion, where, presumably, the guests dined, was decorated with a frieze representing that most edible of birds, the partridge! And, as if not content with all these comforts, the Minoans seem to have gone one step further towards twentieth-century hygiene. There are signs that hot water was laid on in the bathroom!

Some 35 years later this love of ancient bathrooms, a virtual fetish, continued:

The palace boasted an amazingly modern drainage system, which led to the discovery of bathrooms, with elaborate hip baths of baked and glazed clay, beautifully designed and elaborately painted. Water was piped from natural springs on higher ground. The terracotta drain pipes were gracefully tapered and fitted together with ‘sleeves’ or overlap-ping joints that were cemented together. The tapering shape of the drain pipes, which can compare favorably with any modern drain tiles, gave an added thrust to the water passing downward and through them. Wastes from bathrooms were flushed away in a surprisingly modern manner. Again, the tapered shape of the drain pipes, working with gravity, carried off the wastes to a lower level disposal area. Probably, natural-acting bacteria finally broke up the wastes, much as it does in rural and farm areas today where septic tanks are commonly used. All this intricate system of piped water and drain-age clearly indicated the Minoans had some knowledge of hydraulics and knew how to manipulate water for their purposes (Hon-our 1961: 124-25).

This interest in Minoan toilets and sewage has received almost as much attention in schol-arly publications as it has in the popular press,

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beginning with Deonna’s Les toilettes modernes de la Crète minoenne (1911) and continuing into the present (Macdonald and Driessen 1988). It is worth adding that this interest in Minoan water systems and sanitation may stem from the fact that in the mid-Victorian period in Britain, many of the problems of sewage, drainage and general sanitation were so bad that 1858 was actually known as the ‘Great Stink’ (Dobson 1997). What Evans started, however, went well beyond the modernity of the Minoan toilet. As Bintliff’s generation of ‘flower power’ was just gearing up, Honour (1961: 170) could state:

To his cousins across the Atlantic, Church-ill’s call was equally clear: ‘… give us the tools… and we will finish the job…’ Churchill understood, perhaps more clearly than anyone else, the guardianship of free-dom had crossed the ocean to rest in the unwilling hands of America. They were the inheritors of Western civilization that had grown from Cretan roots. Great America was scarcely aware of her own giant strength and greatness. But she was not deaf—Churchill got tools and support beyond his most dar-ing hopes.

How, exactly, ‘the guardianship of freedom’ moved from Knossos to Athens and ulti-mately to Great Britain and the United States remains a little-discussed issue. What is clear, however, is that Evans, by bringing to light an early European civilization, gave politi-cally dominant Europeans of the early 20th century a noble ancestry. Despite the obvious racism inherent in such a view (Trigger 1989: 111-14), especially its blatant anti-semitic and anti-black African stance—an aspect that scholars such as Bernal (1987; 1991), among others, have attempted to address, Evans was successful in balancing two seem-ingly contradictory views, an issue very well treated by MacEnroe (1995: 5-7). Although Evans disagreed with several details presented in Oscar Montelius’s thesis of ex oriente lux

(Montelius 1899; 1903; Evans 1907–1909), he never questioned the underlying premise of diffusionism. Unlike Reinach, however, who insisted that Aegean cultures had devel-oped independently (Reinach 1893; cf. 1892), Evans argued that the views of Montelius and Reinach were not entirely contradictory and maintained that Aegean civilization, although European and indigenous, was opened to both eastern and western influences (Evans 1896; MacEnroe 1995: 7). As Daniel (1950: 180) and MacEnroe (1995) have shown, this opin-ion ran counter to the then-held conventional wisdom that saw Mycenaean civilization as an import to Greece, either by Aryan invaders from the north, or by Phoenicians from the east. For Evans, Aegean culture was ‘a native development that began with the Minoans, who, like the English, were the product of several peoples’ (MacEnroe 1995: 7, 16-17 n. 20, for a selection of some of Evans’s most bla-tantly racist comments about ‘inferior races’; see also Evans 1897–98: x; 1921; 1928). Here modern ethnicity became entangled with archaeology, nationalism, and politics. Evans’s legacy, however, particularly his influence on the concept of European archae-ology, was to go much deeper, into the very core of institutionalized European prehistory. It was not until 1925, four years after the publication of the first volume of The Palace of Minos, that the first pan-European syn-thesis to apply the concept of an archaeologi-cal culture systematically was ever published (Trigger 1989: 168-69). Entitled The Dawn of European Civilization, the book went into six editions, and it remained, for many decades, the standard textbook on European prehistory (Childe 1925). Its author, V. Gordon Childe, was well known as the ‘ugly Australian’ (Cun-liffe 1973: 15). Earlier pan-European syntheses were influential, such as the work of Mon-telius (1899; 1903; Trigger 1989: 155-61); so too Myres’s The Dawn of History, to which Childe’s title directly alluded (Myres 1911).



Views very similar to those of Myres were held by Evans and expressed in print some 15 years earlier (e.g. Evans 1896). But it was in Childe that the concept of an archaeological culture became the working tool of all European archaeologists (Trigger 1989: 169). The details of Childe’s life have received a hagiography perhaps even greater than that of Evans (Gathercole 1971; 1976; 1982; 1994; McNairn 1980; Green 1981; Trigger 1980; Tringham 1983; Sherratt 1989; Har-ris 1994). Born in Sydney in 1892, Childe, having graduated from the University of Sydney, left for Oxford in 1914—the year Europe erupted—where he obtained a First in Greats. He began work on a BLitt thesis in which he hoped to find the ‘cradle’ of the Indo-Europeans and to identify their primitive culture; more specifically, he had hoped to find archaeological links between Thessaly and some part of the north Balkans from where similar links might also lead to Iran and India (Cunliffe 1973: 18). The two scholars at Oxford who influenced and guided him most were John Myres and Arthur Evans (Sherratt 1989: 155, 176-78); and it should not be forgotten that Childe’s first publica-tion was on an Aegean theme—namely ‘On the date and origin of Minyan Ware’ (Childe 1915). It is worth adding, as Sherratt (1989: 155 n. 11) has noted, that Childe’s only fel-low student on the Diploma course at Oxford was Joan Evans, Arthur Evans’s half-sister. After Oxford, Childe returned briefly to Australia to serve as secretary to the Labour Premier of New South Wales, and published his often-referred-to-but-little-read treatise on Australian socialist politics, How Labour Gov-erns (Childe 1923; see Gathercole et al. 1995). He was a confirmed atheist and a strong advo-cate of Marxist political theory. He returned to Europe after the Great War and traveled widely throughout eastern Europe; his itiner-ary was remarkably similar to that of Arthur Evans several decades earlier (Brown 1993).

He returned to England in 1922 and worked as the librarian of the Royal Anthropological Institute. In 1927 he became the first Aber-cromby Professor of Prehistoric Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh. That same year he contributed an essay on ‘The Minoan influence on the Danubian Bronze Age’ for Evans’s Festschrift volume (Childe 1927). In it, he wrote: ‘The available evidence, scanty and insufficient though it be, suggests that the channel by which the life-giving current from the Aegean reached Central Europe was the Danube itself’ (Childe 1927: 4; cf. Wace 1927a). Childe held his chair at Edinburgh until he was appointed Professor of European Archae-ology and Director of the Institute of Archae-ology at the University of London in 1946. In 1957, at the age of 65, he returned to Australia, where he died within a few weeks of arriving in the Blue Mountains outside his hometown of Sydney. Just before his sudden death he wrote the now famous autobiographical note, published posthumously in Antiquity, which many scholars have interpreted as a suicide note (Childe 1958a). As Barry Cunliffe (1973: 16) elaborates, in it he describes how his life’s work followed a logical pattern of research and discovery which gradually unfolded, the results of which were presented in several books cul-minating in the last edition of The Dawn of European Civilization (Childe 1925) and The Prehistory of European Society (Childe 1958b). Although Childe in many of his publications moved away from the notions of mentors such as Evans and Myres, he always saw himself as the link between the great Aegean archae-ologists and their rapidly accumulating, often sensational, discoveries, on the one hand, and the parochial developments in Britain, on the other (Cunliffe 1973: 16). He bridged this gap by looking at Britain, the Aegean and the rest of Europe in between. As Sherratt has shown, his great achievement was not only bringing order to a multitude of national (though not

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always nationalistic) prehistoric sequences, but also attempting to build social and economic models to explain these patterns; in short, he gave European prehistory a coherence that made systematic progress possible (Sherratt 1989: 175; 1996: 18-19). More than this, his work permitted, for the first time, discourse on the notion of Europe in antiquity. Perhaps the most remarkable of all Childe’s achievements was the very fact that a Marxist, an atheist and an ‘ugly Australian’ succeeded at all in the Britain of the 1920s and went as far as he did. Although it could be argued that British academe was, in this case, a model of propriety and fair-play, blindly choosing merit above all else, it could equally be argued that the influence of Myres and Evans in the future of one of their students was to prove significant. It should be remembered that it was through Myres’s good offices that Childe was appointed, in 1925, librarian to the Royal Anthropological Institute and it was during his tenure there that Childe went on to pub-lish The Dawn of European Civilization (see Sherratt 1989: 156). The monument standing today on the Kephala Hill is, literally, the most concrete aspect of Evans’s legacy. But, from an archaeo-logical point of view, his legacy remains solidly intact, inasmuch as he not only brought to life a hitherto unknown culture, but through it established a very real concept of European archaeology, which sought a European iden-tity. This concept of a European identity, vali-dated by a European prehistory, even though it received its ‘life-giving current’ from the Aegean (Childe 1927: 4), and ultimately from the cultures of the most ancient East (Childe 1928; 1934), was taken furthest by one whom Evans influenced (e.g. Childe 1925; 1926; 1929; 1958a). Childe, in his academic posi-tions at Edinburgh and London, and as a pioneer of archaeological thought, was able to elevate and spread the essence of Evans’s Minoans, rather than the chapter-and-verse as presented in The Palace of Minos, in a way

that Evans himself could never have done. In his ‘Introduction’ to the Sixth Edition of The Dawn of European Civilization, Cunliffe wrote: ‘At the end of his life he [Childe] believed with evident satisfaction that he could see a stage about 1500 BC when a truly European culture had emerged. Had he been alive today, he would probably have reduced the date to 3000 or even 4000 BC and been equally delighted with the result’ (1973: 28; my emphasis). In either case, he was very wrong, for ‘Europe’ itself is a cultural construct invented and maintained by the West. The legacy of Knossos and European prehis-tory does not end, however, with Evans and Childe. The latter was to influence profoundly, among many others, a number of prominent Minoanists and Aegean prehistorians. One such student of Childe is Sinclair Hood. Edu-cated at Harrow School (as was Evans) and Magdalen College, Oxford, where in 1938 he received (like Evans before him) a degree in Modern History, Hood went on to complete a Diploma in Prehistoric European Archaeology (1947) at the Institute of Archaeology, Lon-don, after study with Dame Kathleen Kenyon and Gordon Childe. He went on to become Director of the British School of Archaeol-ogy (1954–62), and directed or co-directed excavations at Knossos in 1950–51, 1953–55, 1957–61, 1973, and 1987 (see Evely et al. 1994: xv-xvi, xix). Like the spectre of Evans, the legacy of Childe goes to the very core of institutional-ized Aegean prehistory, especially that prac-ticed by English-speaking archaeologists. Here I stress ‘English-speaking’, because as Sherratt (1989: 183 n. 73) has noted, ‘in Germany the rejection of Gustaf Kossinna and a suspicion of general theory in the post-war period led in effect to a revival of Montelius, and Ger-man prehistorians have only slowly accepted the validity of radio-carbon dating’ (for the role of Kossinna, see especially Trigger 1989: 163-67; Veit 1984; various papers in Kohl and Fawcett 1995). Nowhere is this more evident



than in the published work of Colin Renfrew, beginning with his innovative overturning of Childe’s chronological and intellectual frame-work, by arguing for European ‘autonomy’ through radio-carbon dating (Renfrew 1967; 1968; 1969), and continuing with the affir-mation that Minoan-Mycenaean civilization and its predecessors owed little to Oriental inspiration, in his The Emergence of Civilization, which was dedicated to the memory of Childe (Renfrew 1972: xxv-xxvi, 45-60). He not only accepted the ‘Minoans’ as presented by Evans, but stated that the pre-palatial finds on Crete are ‘instantly recognizable’ as ‘Minoan’, and in his discussion of the ‘man-made’ environ-ment, he even uses one of the Art Nouveau reconstructions prepared by Piet de Jong for Evans to make the point (Renfrew 1972: 46-47, fig. 4.1). Indeed, many scholars continue to believe that the Minoans emerged as a ‘race’ of sorts sometime around 3000 BC and disappeared around 1000 BC or slightly earlier. In Renfrew’s scenario, not only was Wessex now free of Mycenae, but Europe itself was no longer under the shadow of the ancient Near East: Europe could now stand proud with an independent, autonomous antiquity. The dia-logue with the ghost of Gordon Childe contin-ued in the late 1970s in a volume on Problems in European Prehistory; in its preface Renfrew (1979: 2-3) wrote:

Already in the Preface to the first edition in 1925 of his great work The Dawn of European Civilization he [Childe] expressed very well the problem which remains the principal preoccupation of the papers that follow here, even though their conclusions are radically different from his. He wrote (Childe 1925, xiii) in words which we can echo today: ‘My theme is the foundation of European Civilization as a peculiar and indi-vidual manifestation of the human spirit’.

Here, once more, was the idea of ‘Europe’ with all its arrogance and implications of superiority. And the growing political clout of

the European Union has meant that a variety of archaeological projects from Sicily to Scan-dinavia and Hungary have been specifically funded by the European Union to determine links between the various parts of Europe and to study the ‘emergence of European com-munities’. And through European funding the notion of Europe is maintained and perpetu-ated. Although many current schools of archae-ology still hail Childe as a founding father, much of his work has been completely super-seded, and many of his principal conclusions shown to be incorrect (Sherratt 1989: 153). The work of his mentor, although much of it too was queried and shown to be incorrect, has fared somewhat better. Evans’s greatest achievement—his vision of a Minoan civili-zation—‘warrants the honorific title of civi-lization. It ranks … as one of the great early civilizations of the world’ (Renfrew 1972: 47). Its success was virtually assured, because through Evans, the empires of the western world had, for the first time, an ancestry that went beyond that of the Roman Empire and even beyond Alexander the Great, or the era of Athenian democracy. It was an ancestry not of brutal and belligerent force, but one of con-structed peace-loving priest-kings; a virtual escape from the horrors of the human carnage of the Great War, and it continued to appeal to a Europe that was to see even more devasta-tion. It was an ancestry that could match even that of Egypt and the ancient Near East. Great Britain, along with France and Germany, and all of Europe and North America, now had an ancestry—a cradle of European civiliza-tion—even though the appropriation of Crete as part of ‘Europe’ was always questionable.

Mythology and Archaeology

Ironically, that which first led Evans to Crete, the promise of a form of writing predating the introduction of the Phoenician alphabet

130 Papadopoulos


as adopted by the later Greeks (Evans 1901; 1908; 1909), ultimately eluded him, since he did not live to see its decipherment. For Evans, his discovery of Linear A and B was not only a major event in its own right, but a blow to the primacy of both classical and Semitic (Phoenician) civilization. He proved beyond any doubt that his Minoan ‘proto-Europeans’ wrote well before the Phoenicians and the clas-sical Greeks. With obvious glee, Wace (1956: xxxix) wrote, in his ‘Foreword’ to Ventris and Chadwick’s Documents in Mycenaean Greek: ‘Evans long ago suggested that perhaps the ear-liest Greek epics had been written in “Minoan” and then translated into Greek. There is now no longer any need to imagine this, since we know that the Linear B tablets are in Greek and an early epic poet, had he been so minded, could have recorded his masterpieces on clay’. Despite some attempts to establish the con-trary (e.g. Boardman 1961–62; 1963; Hood 1962a; 1962b; 1984; Popham 1964; 1970), the late date of the Linear B tablets and their decipherment as Greek showed that Evans’s insistence on Minoan political primacy over the Mycenaean mainland was untenable. This was an argument that had a long his-tory. In the early 1920s, while Evans was still working at Knossos, Wace, then Director of the British School of Archaeology at Ath-ens and excavator of Mycenae, was intrepid enough to challenge some of Evans’s most cherished theories and even the primacy of Evans’s Minoans (McDonald and Thomas 1990: 247-91; Fitton 1996: 150-65; also Pend-lebury 1939; Nilsson 1933). Wace, together with his long-time friend and collaborator Carl Blegen, had already incurred Evans’s wrath with the publication in 1918 of their joint paper (Wace and Blegen 1918) on the pre-Mycenaean pottery of the mainland, in which they directly challenged Evans’s basic assump-tion that from c. 1600 BC the Greek mainland was dominated by Minoan culture. They went further by prescribing that the all-inclusive

term ‘Minoan’ be changed to ‘Helladic’ for the mainland. This was followed by the battle over the Minoan versus Mycenaean vicissitudes of the tholos tombs of Mycenae (Wace 1926a; 1926b; 1929; for the opposing view, see Evans 1925a; 1925b; 1925c; 1928; 1929; see also Childe 1924). In this case, Evans forcefully, but wrongly, argued that the tholos tombs of Mycenae had to predate the shaft graves. Only a few years before Evans’s death, Wace and Blegen rang the death-knell for Cretan supremacy in their article published in Klio (Wace and Blegen 1939; see further Palmer 1969b). In the same year Pendlebury responded by attempting to re-establish Minoan political domination, though he did concede to the term ‘Helladic’ for the mainland, stating that ‘it does not attempt to ram the name of a city down the throat of a country…’ (Pendlebury 1939: xxiv). On 4 April 1939, Blegen began his excavations at the site overlooking Nava-rino Bay and almost immediately came across the remains of the large building, or complex of buildings, he was to call the ‘Palace of Nestor’. More significantly, he chanced upon a small room with hundreds of clay tablets inscribed in Linear B similar to those found at Knossos, but dating at least two centuries later (closer to 1200, rather than 1400 BC). In the same year Europe erupted once more. Well after the Second World War and the death of Evans, the controversy continued, especially over the date of the destruction of the palace at Knos-sos (bibliography in Grumach 1963: 227-30; 1967: 99-104; Hallager 1977; Palmer 1969a; Raison 1969; for overviews of the debate, see Niemeier 1982: 219-87; Snodgrass 1987: 43-47), which was initiated by Blegen the year following Wace’s death (Blegen 1958a; 1958b), carried on by Palmer (1961; 1965; 1969b) and by more recent students (Driessen 1990), although the Oxford establishment ral-lied to the cause of Evans, defending him to the bitter end (e.g. Boardman 1961–62; 1963; Hood 1962a; 1962b; Popham 1964; 1970). As



recently as 1984, Hood continued the debate by suggesting the possibility that the Palace of Nestor, or more accurately part of Messenia, might have been settled or politically control-led by Minoans (Hood 1984). A decade earlier the island of Kythera, and more specifically the site of Kastri, was identified as the ‘old-est Cretan colony yet found outside Crete’ (Coldstream and Huxley 1972: 309). Here was, in a very real sense, the Minoan thalas-socracy—a.k.a. the British Empire—not only coming to life, but striking back! Despite the ferocity of such battles, Evans’s Minoans were well-established both in the scholarly and public spheres, and facts such as the date of the destruction of the palace (give or take a century or two), though deemed matters worthy of bloodshed for some schol-ars, were little more than trifles for the public. So too the deconstruction of the ‘Priest-King’ by scholars such as Bennett, Cadogan, Niemeier and Muhly—the latter remarking: ‘The Priest-King may well be dead, but it is not yet clear who will succeed him’ (Bennett 1961-62; Cadogan 1976: 9, 54; Muhly 1990: 60; Niemeier 1987; 1988; also S.P. Morris 1992b: 205; most recently Sherratt 2000). In a similar vein, the demolition of the ‘peaceful’ and ‘peace-loving’ nature of Minoan society, by scholars like Alexiou (1979: 41 n. 1), for example, as well as the undermining of the very basis of Evans’s chronology (see above), has had virtually no influence on the way Minoan culture is still popularly viewed. So who were the Minoans? In Evans’s opin-ion, the earliest population of Crete was ‘Arme-noid’, being related to the people of southern Anatolia, who later mixed with various waves of north African peoples (Nilotic and Libyan), and additional waves of Anatolians and people of ‘Mediterranean stock’ (see further MacEn-roe 1995: 7). Evans’s Minoans, therefore, like the British, were an admixture of peoples brought about by the processes of diffusion, invasion and migration. The Anatolian com-

plexities almost anticipate a more recent view: the proposal that the language of Linear A may be an ancestor of Lycian, as argued by Finkel-berg (1990–91; Brown 1992–93). This would substantiate Palmer’s earlier hypothesis in its general outline that Bronze Age Crete was inhabited by Luwians and that the language they spoke was a ‘Luwoid’ dialect (Palmer 1965: 333-38; Finkelberg 1990-91: 83; cf. also Billigmeier 1969; Furumark 1956; Georgiev 1963; Goold and Pope 1966; Meriggi 1956; Pugliese Carratelli 1952–54; Renfrew 1998), as well as Huxley’s suggestion that, before Greek speakers first came to Crete, the rulers of the island had affinities with the Luwians. Huxley (1961) saw the Luwians as speakers of an Indo-European tongue who were settled in many parts of western and southern Anatolia in the Late Bronze Age. Such a thesis refutes alter-native theories that view Minoan as Semitic (C.H. Gordon 1966), or an even earlier notion that sought to read Minoan Linear A with the help of Basque (F.G. Gordon 1931). If Finkel-berg’s proposed identification of the language of Linear A as an ancestor of Lycian (west Luwian) is correct—and the evidence she mus-ters is certainly interesting, though not without flaws—then Evans’s Minoans are western Ana-tolians. Although speakers of Indo-European, these ‘Minoan-Lycians’ would have been fully-fledged ‘barbarians’ for any speaker of classical Greek. This is not a new theory; for Herodotos (I. 173; cf. VII. 92) wrote:

The Lycians are in good truth anciently from Crete; which island, in former days, was wholly peopled with barbarians. A quar-rel arising there between the two sons of Europa, Sarpedon and Minos, as to which of them should be king, Minos, whose party prevailed, drove Sarpedon and his followers into banishment. The exiles sailed to Asia, and landed on the Milyan territory. Milyas was the ancient name of the country now inhabited by the Lycians: the Milyae of the present day were, in those times, called Solymi. So long as Sarpedon reigned, his

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followers kept the name which they brought with them from Crete, and were called Termilae, as the Lycians still are by those who live in their neighbourhood. But after Lycus, the son of Pandion, banished from Athens by his brother Aegeus, had found a refuge with Sarpedon in the country of these Termilae, they came, in course of time, to be called from him Lycians. (Trans. G. Rawlinson.)

As Asheri (1983: 87; cf. Huxley 1961) argues, Cretan myths constituted an integral part of Lycian tradition and as Finkelberg has shown ‘Termilae’ was the only name, in surviving Lycian inscriptions, by which the Lycians called themselves (Finkelberg 1990–91: 82-83). Whether the later Lycians, like Evans, appropriated and used Crete for their own purposes, does not alter the fact that some of the inhabitants of Bronze Age Crete linguistically did not differ from some of the inhabitants of Asia Minor (cf. Renfrew 1998; for archaeological evidence bearing on this question see, most recently, the results of Niemeier’s [1997] excavations at Miletos). The Lycian precept begs the question as to which name the Minoans referred to them-selves. One attempt to answer this question, by H.G. Wunderlich (1974), left its author on the virtual ‘lunatic fringe’ of Aegean prehistory. According to Wunderlich (1974: ix), ‘histori-cal accuracy’ would call for the use of the term ‘Keftiu’ for ‘Minoan’, but as he further states: ‘the fantasy names “Minoan” and “Minoan culture” are still too solidly established in gen-eral use to be relinquished, although there is no historical evidence to support them’ (for an overview of the term ‘Keftiu’, see Dickinson 1994: 248-49; for the argument that Keftiu cannot be definitively associated with Crete, see Vandersleyen 2003). In the headlong quest to determine the ‘Minoan’ versus ‘Mycenaean’ vicissitudes and thereby priorities of Crete—a preoccupation of Aegean prehistory throughout the 20th

century and a subject in dire need of a little post-colonial theory—scholars have tended to forget Homer’s warning of the linguistic complexity and ethnic diversity of prehistoric and protohistoric Crete:

There is a land called Crete, in the midst of the wine-dark sea, a fair, rich land, begirt with water, and therein are many men, past counting, and ninety cities. They have not all the same speech, but their tongues are mixed. There dwell Achaians, there great-hearted native Cretans [Eteocretans], there Kydonians and Dorians of waving plumes, and goodly Pelasgians (Homer, Odyssey 19. 172-77, translated by A.T. Murray [Loeb edn., Cambridge, Massachusetts and Lon-don 1980], with my amendments).

Homer, however, was a bard and the physical and spiritual center of his narrative, the citadel of Troy, provides one of the oldest continuous memories in the western world. In the words of Vermeule (1986: 77), ‘its real forms survive in good health, and its imaginary forms are prolific and infinitely renewable, from visions of the fifth century BC through Chaucer and Shakespeare to our own mental pictures of it’. In the same way that Evans painted his image and mental picture of Knossos and filled his Palace of Minos with Priest-Kings crowned with lily plumes, tightly-girdled, flounced and corseted great ladies, long-stoled priests and a retinue of elegant but sinewy youths, most ‘Troys have formidable and prominent walls, some kind of royal castle, terraces and streets filled with royalty and Helen-watchers. It is usually in danger, from an army camped outside the walls, and the imaginary moment of choice usually contrasts the present alarms with the old wealthy days of peace “before the sons of the Achaians came” (Iliad 9. 409)’ (Vermeule 1986: 77). Troy, like the Iliad, pos-sesses a historical consciousness (Kullmann 1999: 112). And it is ironic that both Troy and Knossos were destroyed, in one or other version, by Achaians.



When Vermeule (1986: 77) asks the ques-tions—‘Why has the western world such pow-erful memories of an old, old fight far away? Why does the Trojan War stand in some way for all wars, and supercede many more recent wars in interest?’—the answer is straightfor-ward: it is the power of Homeric poetry. She goes on to discuss those aspects of Homer that appealed in antiquity and continue to do so. One important aspect is the fact that the Iliad is the first poem or work of literature to give equal dignity to the victors and the vanquished; it shows the ‘enemy’ in a com-passionate and noble light (Vermeule 1986: 77). Evans’s narrative never permitted the existence of an enemy, and this was its great success. By doing away with the enemy alto-gether, Evans’s imagination and narrative were free to explore a society against the backdrop of its—his—own humanity. An eternal, ideal-ized, peace-loving realm on an island girt by sea and on which the sun always shone. His vision clearly appealed to Europe, as it contin-ues to do so. Like Homer’s Troy, Evans gave Europe—as he gave himself—something of an escape from 20th-century realities and, at the same time, some sense of identity, through a link with the past. The only difference is that where Homer wove his magic in words alone, Evans embellished his with reinforced con-crete and bright paint.

Coda

Minoan studies have progressed a great deal since Evans’s death in 1941 and they are constantly developing. Despite the fact that many of Evans’s notions have not only been questioned, but successfully deconstructed, and despite much recent work in the Aegean by scholars who have sought to analyze Crete in new and exciting ways (see, among oth-ers, some of the papers in Krzyszkowska and Nixon 1983; bibliography in Myers et al. 1992: 124-47; Watrous 1994; Hamilakis 2002), the

specter of Evans is ever present. It lingers on in numerous subtle ways, such as the man-ner in which Minoan studies are taught. For example, the standard textbook on the Aegean Bronze Age for many years was Ver-meule’s Greece in the Bronze Age (1972; first publication 1964); it focused on the mainland and a projected companion volume for Crete never materialized. Dickinson’s (1994) more recent attempt at a synthesis, in which Crete, the islands and the mainland are discussed together in roughly chronological order, deals synchronously with cultures very different in character (see Davis 1995). One of the most enduring aspects of the study and teaching of the Aegean Bronze Age is the continuing struggle of Minoan versus Mycenaean, and in this the old battle between Evans and Wace has never really been resolved. A classic case in point is the Minoan versus Mycenaean origins of some of the most well-known artifacts of Aegean Late Bronze Age material culture. For some scholars, such as Higgins (1981), anything half-good in the Aegean Late Bronze Age had to be Minoan. Other voices, for example Dickinson (1994: 140-41; 1977), have sug-gested that ‘Mycenaean’ craft traditions can be distinguished from the Minoan and that cer-tain ‘Mycenaean’ techniques are older. Here it is worth noting that the origins of the two gold Vapheio cups discovered by Tsountas in 1888 are still disputed (see Davis 1974; 1977; Xenaki-Sakellariou 1985). It is one thing to argue, as Perrot first did (in Perrot and Chipiez 1894b: VI, 784-94), that the two Vapheio cups were made by two different hands, but quite another to insist that they were made by artisans from two different cultures and tradi-tions, as Ellen Davis prefers. Although the lat-ter solution had the advantages of compromise and diplomacy, it highlights the lack of defini-tions, if not rigor, in Aegean art history, a point emphasized by Hurwit (1979). Another who entered this debate was Riegl (1906; see also

134 Papadopoulos


Laffineur 1985; Xenaki-Sakellariou 1985). As recently as 1994, Dickinson declared: ‘It will, then, remain difficult to distinguish between imports and local manufacture on the main-land’ (1994: 142; see further Kantor 1947: 3). Another way in which Evans’s specter lin-gers on is in the ways that obvious fakes have entered the standard bibliography and there-fore training of students, falsifying the record and doing much more damage than fetching exorbitant prices and duping some of the most discerning connoisseurs and museum curators in the world. Butcher and Gill (1993), as well as Lapatin (2002; also 2000) more recently, have shown how Cretan Bronze Age forgeries were given prominence as genuine pieces in standard textbooks, including the example of the Fitzwilliam Goddess used as the frontispiece of an early edition of the Cambridge Ancient History, and originally published in a detailed monograph by Evans’s long-time nemesis, Alan Wace (Wace 1927b; see also Gill and Chippin-dale 1993). Beginning from a number of ques-tionable Minoan ivories, Lapatin (2000; 2002) has effectively shown many to be forgeries, and he alludes to two close collaborators of Arthur Evans—the father and son team of the Gilliérons—as a possible source of some of the forgeries. But beyond the fakes enshrined in textbooks are the heavily restored icons of Minoan art—the faience snake goddesses, or the bull’s head rhyton from Knossos, for exam-ple—with all their Art Deco charm, passed off as full-fledged Minoan originals with little or no indication that substantial parts, including the entire head of one of the snake goddesses (Fig-ure 14), were completely restored by Evans. Moreover, Evans’s magnum opus, The Palace of Minos, despite its idiosyncratic, non-scien-tific style, is not only still widely referred to as a standard text, but is one of the few archaeo-logical monographs to have received its own abbreviation—PM—in the American Journal of Archaeology. Similarly subtle, but no less real, is the fact that the Stratigraphical Museum at

Knossos, on which many scholars have heavily relied and continue to do so, was formed, as Hentschel endeavored to show, on the basis not of sound stratigraphy, but on a chronologi-cal scheme conceived and imposed by Evans (Hentschel 1982: 293-94; Heurtley 1936). The legacy survives also in more blatant ways, such as those in which some of Evans’s most questionable ideas have been passionately upheld, often against hopeless odds and some-times even against common sense, by some of his most stalwart supporters. One example of the lengths to which Evans’s supporters went, in order to uphold his view that Crete was not overrun in the early Late Minoan period by Mycenaean mainlanders, was to question Ven-tris’s decipherment of Linear B and the very fact that it was Greek (Chadwick 1967; Hood 1967). This is perhaps even more clearly seen in the fact that Palmer and Boardman, who set out to collaborate on a book presenting the evidence—the contextual and archaeologi-cal facts—for the Linear B tablets, found that they differed not only on the conclusions to be drawn from the evidence, but also on how to utilize or even how to present that evidence (Boardman 1963; Palmer 1963). The influence of Evans lives on not only in the fanciful names given to Bronze Age Cretan material remains, both architecture and small finds, and the chronological, descriptive and pseudo-stratigraphic structure of the culture(s) of the island, but in the very name and concept of Minoan. Arthur Evans did much more than lay down the rules of play as stated by McNeal (1973: 205): he invented them. And whether consciously or unconsciously, we continue to abide by them.

Acknowledgments

This study grew out of an earlier paper on Knossos (Papadopoulos 1997) that formed part of a conference organized by the J. Paul Getty Trust, 6–12 May 1995, on Conservation of



Archaeological Sites in the Mediterranean Region, published some time ago (Torre 1997). In gath-ering materials for that study, which sought to view the site not from an archaeological, but from a conservation and cultural heritage per-spective, I was asked to look at Knossos from a very different point of view. The focus of the conference and its proceedings, however, did not permit sufficient scope or the neces-sary length to explore certain avenues that seemed crucial in understanding the nature of Evans’s intervention at Knossos. Chief among these was the character of Arthur Evans in his own context and his subsequent influence on Aegean prehistory and archaeological thought more generally. Like so many before me, I had to confront the legacy of Evans and I came both to appreciate and to question his work. In this I am guilty of indulging in, and perpetuat-ing, the hagiography of the man, even though I have come to conclusions very different to many currently accepted. For historical back-ground I have drawn heavily on the work of others, particularly that of Anne Brown, Glyn Daniel, Joan Evans, Sinclair Hood, and Bruce Trigger; my debt to them is obvious. I am especially grateful to the former Ephor of Herakleion, Alexandra Karetsou, for placing at my disposal various records on Knossos in her possession and providing me access to all parts of the site. Thanks are also due to Rich-ard Catling, Martha Demas, Colin Macdonald, Giorgos Rethemiotakis, and Nicholas Stanley Price. The extensive archives of Sir Arthur Evans, including the excavation ‘Daybooks’, the original photographs and, not least, clip-pings of newspaper articles on Knossos and Evans, in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, were placed at my disposal by the then Keeper of Antiquities, the late P.R.S. Moorey; to him, and to Andrew Sherratt and Michael Vickers, then Senior Assistant Keepers, I am indebted for their assistance and hospitality during two separate visits to Oxford. Some of the ideas expressed in this paper, as well as numerous

others, were aired as earlier manifestations to various friends, colleagues and students at the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at the University of California, Los Angeles. For their support, encouragement and criticism, I am grateful to Elizabeth Barber, Lara Bernini, Brendan Burke, Elizabeth Carter, Cynthia Colburn, Timothy Earle, Ernestine Elster, Freya Evenson, Louise Hitchcock, Richard Leventhal, Sandy MacGillivray, Sarah Morris, Marianna Nikolaïdou, and Karen Wise. They are, of course, not responsible for the views expressed here. I am also grateful to George Cowgill for stimulating discussion and biblio-graphic assistance with regard to Teotihuacan during an all-too-brief visit to Arizona State University in Phoenix. Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to Clairy Palyvou: I have benefited greatly from numerous enjoyable discussions with her.

About the Author

John Papadopoulos is Professor of Classics and Archaeology in the Department of Clas-sics and the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at the University of California, Los Angeles. His books include: Torone I: The Excavations of 1975–78 (Athens 2001, with Alexander Cambitoglou and Olwen Tudor Jones); The Archaeology of Colonialism (Los Angeles 2002, co-edited with Claire Lyons); Ceramicus Redi-vivus: The Early Iron Age Potters’ Field in the Area of the Classical Athenian Agora (Princeton 2003); La Dea di Sibari e il santuario ritrovato: Studi sui rinvenimenti dal Timpone Motta di Francavilla Marittima. II.1: The Archaic Votive Metal Objects (Rome 2003); Theory and Prac-tice in Mediterranean Archaeology: Old World and New World Perspectives (Los Angeles 2003, co-edited with Richard Leventhal); and two forthcoming books entitled The Early Iron Age Cemetery at Torone, and Antiquity and Photog-raphy (the latter with Andrew Szegedy-Maszak and Claire Lyons).

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