EditArthur Evans
Arthur John Evans. Born 1851, in Nash Mills, Hertfordshire, England; died 11 July, 1941, in Youlbury, Oxfordshire. British archaeologist.
His father was John Evans, a geologist, antiquarian, numismatist, a fellow of the Royal Society, and a member of a paper-making firm.
Arthur Evans went to Harrow School. He then went Brasenose College, University of Oxford where he read modern history. He was disappointed at not winning a college fellowship despite obtaining a first class degree. He also studied at the University of Göttingen.
He travelled around Eastern Europe and was able to pursue his interest in archaeology while engaged as Balkan correspondent for the
Manchester Guardian. However, after being accused of spying in Herzegovina and being banned from the Austro-Hungarian empire he returned to Oxford.
He was married briefly until his wife, Margaret, died of tuberculosis in 1893.
Between 1884 and 1908 he was curator of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. While there he re-arranged the collection to make it more suitable for archaeological research, and also organised its transferral to the large new building where it is now housed.
He developed an interest in coins and engraved gems and he detected on coins previously unnoticed artist signatures. It was announced in 1893 that he had discovered a Mycenaean system of writing. In 1894 he went to Crete to collect more examples of engraved hieroglyphs, and he found that local people were in the possession of clay tablets which bore signs of writing. He began to think that more could be discovered about the Mycenaeans from the site at Knossos, the legendary city of King Minos.
In 1899 he used family money to buy the site at Kephala outside Heraklion which had been suggested as the site of Knossos.
On 23 March 1900 he began excavations at the site, and by 10 April he was uncovering the first of the frescos that he was to make famous.
The site and its interpretation occupied him for the rest of his life.
As he was excavating Knossos he restored the buildings and frescos. He was responsible for the discovery of the Minoan Civilisation, but he was criticised for some of his interpretations and for using materials in his reconstructions that the Minoans would not have known. He also had his own view about the history of the Labrys.
He was knighted in 1911. In 1924, when aged 73, he was arrested in Hyde Park and accused of committing an act of public indecency with George Cook.
Writing
Scripta Minoa: the written documents of Minoan Crete, with special reference to the archives of Knossos, volume 1, 1909; volume 2 posthumously in 1952, Oxford.
Palace of Minos: a comparative account of the successive stages of the early Cretan civilisation as illustrated by the discoveries at Knossos, 4 volumes 1921-1935, Oxford.
Jarn Mound, 1933.
Bibliography
Ann Brown Before Knossos: Arthur Evans's Travels in the Balkans and Crete, Ashmolean Museum.
Ann Brown, (editor), with
Keith Bennett, (2002), Arthur Evans's Travels in Crete 1894-1899, Archaeopress, 509 pages, ISBN 1 84171 281 7.
Piecing together the archaeologist by John Bennet in
The Times Higher Education Supplement, 19 July, 2002, page 26. "After a short introduction outlining the historical and archaeological background on Crete and summarising Evans's travels, the core of Brown's book comprises a year-by-year account of Evans's travels from 1894 to 1899. Only the account of the first year is substantially Evan's own words. Seventy-eight pages of Evans's Notebook C, spanning March 15 to April 24 1894, are accompanied by a line-by-line transcription, explanatory notes and illustrations (a mixture of Evans's sketches plus photographs)."
Sylvia L. Horwitz, (1981), The Find of a Lifetime: Sir Arthur Evans and the discovery of Knossos, New York.
Joseph Alexander MacGillivray, (1999), MINOTAUR: Sir Arthur Evans and the Archaeology of the Minoan Myth, Jonathan Cape, 373 pages, ISBN 0 224 04352 8.
Legend of the Minoans is a racist myth by Adam Luck in
The Sunday Times, 23 July, 2000, page 15. "The father of modern archaeology was allegedly a closet homosexual whose racism helped to shape and perpetuate the myth of the Minotaur, one of the ancient world's most enduring legends. This is the startling theory at the heart of a new book about Sir Arthur Evans, the Victorian scholar, and his discovery of the palace of King Minos during his landmark excavations at Knossos, in Crete. In his book Minotaur: Sir Arthur Evans and the Archaeology of the Minoan Myth, Sandy MacGillivray, an established Canadian archaeologist, argues that millions of tourists - as well as his fellow diggers - have been wrongly held in the thrall of Evans for too long. MacGillivray claims that the Minoans, the Bronze Age Cretans uncovered by Evans's excavations, are largely the creation of his Victorian mind.""MacGillivray also contends that Evans's creative drive stemmed from his suppressed homosexuality. Later in life Evans was convicted of gross indecency. People with closet tendencies, things to hide, would often go abroad to satisfy themselves. It gave them their energy' said MacGillivray."
A classical dilemma by
James Davidson in
The Sunday Times Culture magazine, 30 July, 2000, page 40-41. "This is an unworthy biography. MacGillivray is himself a Minoan archaeologist and ought to have said more clearly where he thinks Evans went wrong and what truth about Minoan society his 'invention' is masking. Instead he constantly insinuates recklessness while keeping his own neck unexposed. Evans wasn't perfect and he was eccentric, but he was a pioneering archaeologist and a remarkably generous character in pocket, spirit and mind. The negative spin put on almost all of his actions by MacGillivray sounds desperate. Measured against the hesitancy of modern archaeology, Evans is surely deficient. Measured against MacGillivray's unconvincing insinuations, he comes to seem something of an archaeological saint."
The dreamer who invented a lost world by Ruth Padel in
The Independent: The Friday Review, 18 August, 2000, page 5. "
Edward Lear did a sketch of Knossos, Crete, in 1864 but thought its landscape boring. Neither he nor anyone else believed that the 'scattered brickwork' was a famous ruined city.""In a book about the dangers of false interpretation, MacGillivray might have been charier of over-analysing Evans's psyche - he suggests, for example, that Evans was 'haunted' by the Minotaur because it represented his own homosexuality, and fancied mother-figure interpretations because he lost his own mother young. Though he often says that Evans 'would have done better' to avoid some wild explanation or other, he never says what he should have deduced instead. Still, this is the story of a man who changed history, written by one of his most dynamic heirs. MacGillivray, the archaeological Prince Theseus in the labyrinth of Minoan interpretation, roughs up the old king's throne a bit. But he leaves Evans's achievement - and his 'intellectual alchemy' - thrillingly intact."
The lie of the Knossos land by Tom Palaima in
The Times Higher Education Supplement, 18 August, 2000, page 19. "He was sure that at Knossos, myth would intersect with history. He was right. If you believe Joseph Alexander MacGillivray's
Minotaur, Evans was wrong. His book will appeal to those convinced by Martin Bernal's controversial
Black Athena (1987) that ancient Greek culture had Afro-Asiatic origins. MacGillivray uses a Bernalist style of oblique reasoning and implies at several points strong Egyptian influence on the palatial society of Minoan Crete (c.1900-1200 BC).""Richard Daley, the late mayor of Chicago, coined the useful neologism 'insinuendo' for this technique. MacGillivray uses it artfully to put spin on Evans's school days at Harrow and to transform innocent remarks by Evans's mother into proof that Evans had a dark, Minotaurish and 'volcanic' nature. MacGillivray also uses insinuendo to associate Evans with culturally elitist and racist ideas of his father-in-law, Edward Freeman."
Builder of Ruins by Mary Beard in the
London Review of Books, 30 November, 2000, pages 26-27. "MacGillivray himself worked for several years at Knossos; and it is hard to resist the conclusion that this book is partly a settling of old scores with a ghost whose presence must still be felt heavily there. Evans is not, from the outside, a particularly plausible villain and the tactics that MacGillivray must adopt to paint him as such become increasingly desperate as the book progresses: never let a sentence pass without the insertion of a pejorative adjective; never suggest a decent motive on Evans's part if a bad one will do."
Slaying Sir Arthur, not the Minotaur by Robin Osborne in
The Times Literary Supplement, 2 February, 2001. "Loath to change his mind, and prepared to use his influence to hinder those who disagreed with him, Evans was no model scholar. But MacGillivray's portrait of him as a selfish closet homosexual of racist views who owed his position to the reputation and money of his father, Sir John Evans, and whose writing about and reconstruction of Knossos were romantic fantasies, renders Evans's life, career and work well-nigh incomprehensible."