sir arthur evans and his achievement

SIR ARTHUR EVANS AND HIS ACHIEVEMENT*

PETER WARREN

Arthur John Evans was born at the Red House, by Nash Mills in Hertfordshire, on July 8th 1851. He was the first son of John Evans, innovative and highly successful paper manufacturer, eminent explorer of earliest man, and brilliant antiquary, and of Harriet Ann, nte Dickinson. She wrote of the baby ‘As he has a very finely formed head and marked intelligent features I hope he will have good sense and then a great deal may be done by training’.’ Arthur was to grow up in a wealthy home, ideal for the cultivation of archaeological interests and for making possible the acquisition of a thorough knowledge of the artefacts of antiquity. At Harrow he won the prize for Greek epigrams, was Secretary of the Scientific Society, exhibited Roman coins from St AIbans and Rdman glass bottles from Cologne, and read a paper on the antiquity of man. At Oxford, aged twenty, he published his first paper, on a coin hoard of Edward 111, in the Numismatic Chronicle.

After graduating with a first class in History he expanded on earlier European travels by returning to the Balkans in 1875. There, at the age of twenty-four, he began that span of his life devoted to a double cause. He championed the rights of the Slovenians, Bosnians, and Montenegrins, oppressed under Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian rule, and, alongside the distribution of food supplies and reporting on the people’s miseries as correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, he also made detailed studies of ancient sites, their antiquities, topography, and interconnecting routes along the Balkan coast and through its formidable mountains. His socio-political work was published in his book of over 450 pages, Through Bosnia and the Hercegovina on Foot during the Insurrection ( 1876) and in Illyriatz Letters ( 1 878). His archaeological work appeared in two long, brilliant, well illustrated and still today fundamental papers in Archaeologia 48 and 49, in all 272 pages. The potential of his father’s guidance in the material remains of antiquity, his own fine topographical sense, and his historical training at Oxford and Gottingen was realized in these outstanding and deeply researched Balkan studies, conducted between the ages of twenty-four and thirty-one.

On September 19th, 1878, he married Margaret Freeman, daughter of the historian and Liberal Edward Freeman. They made their home outside Ragusa (Dubrovnik) and she was

*This article is based on the text of a lecture given at the British Museum on IS March 2000 m an invited contribution to the marking of the Knossos Centenary by The Institute of Classical Studies (School of Advanced Study, University of London), the British Museum, the British School at Athens, and the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies. I am grateful to the Director of the Institute, Professor G. B. Waywell, for his invitation to publish the lecture in BICS. It is printed in a slightly expanded form, with, in addition, a few references and a short bibliography. The latter is for further reading and is not exhaustive: the works by A. Brown and J . N. L. Myres contain further references.

‘ J . E. A. Evans, Time und chance. The story oj‘Arthur Evuns and hisfiirebeurs (London 1943) 83.

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his constant helpmate for their fourteen years of marriage. For Margaret died at Alassio in 1893, aged only forty-five. During their marriage they travelled widely in the Mediterranean, including Greece, where Evans met Schliemann and saw his finds from Mycenae. Oxford had become his home in 1882 and from 1884 he was Keeper of the Ashmolean. For years he battled for enlightenment and endeavored to establish archaeology beyond the narrow, Classical, limits within which the conservative Jowett would alone tolerate its existence. Not until 1896 were matters finally settled with the establishment of the new Ashmolean, largely through Evans’s campaigning. He was virtually the Museum’s second founder. Meanwhile his scholarship had by no means languished. He published his huge and authoritative papers on Tarentine and Syracusan numismatics (1 889, 1892) and his report on his excavations of the Late Belgic urnfield at Aylesford in Kent, another major conspectus and one by which he became an authority on Late Celtic art.

Joan Evans, his half-sister, tells in Time and Chance (1943) how a new vision then began to haunt him: the island of Crete. In February 1892, in Rome, he met and became friends with Federico Halbherr, six years his junior but already intimate with Crete and its antiquities since 1884. Inspired by Halbherr, and nurturing a belief, based on his earlier purchases in Athens of gems engraved with a kind of hieroglyphic script and said to come from that island, that research there might produce very early evidence of writing and all that writing implied, Evans first set foot in the land which, in Joan Evans’s words, ‘for the rest of his life was to be the kingdom of his mind’.* He arrived on March 15th, 1894, that is on this very day one hundred and six years ago.

The value of his explorations and travels through the island in the 1890s cannot be over- emphasized. After exploring the site of Knossos with Halbherr and soon making the most helpful and fruitful acquaintance of the Cretan founder of Cretan archaeology, Joseph Hatzidhakis, Evans travelled via ancient Ax& to the city of Rethymno, then south to the Monastery of Arkadhi, where the great self-sacrifice involving the blowing up of the building in the face of the besieging Turks had occurred only twenty eight years earlier, in 1866. He rode through a tremendous wind over the foothills of Ida to Kamares but could not reach the cave because of snow. He then proceeded southeastwards along the coast to Arvi (Plate I ) , where in 1962 the aged former schoolmaster, Mr Stephanakis, could still recall to Sinclair Hood, Gerald Cadogan and myself that visit in 1894. From Arvi he went east to Hierapetra, Zakros and Palaikastro, everywhere buying engraved sealstones, then returned via Kritsa and the city of Goulas, as he called it, now the famous Classical polis of Lato, Elounda and Milatos to Candia (Herakleion).

In the following years Evans returned to negotiate for Knossos, with the indispensable help of Hatzidhakis, and continued to travel and to buy gems. Indeed on the very day he first arrived, in 1894, he tells us ‘I bought 22 early Cretan stones at about 1 !h piastres apiece’ and next day ‘secured 21 gems and a Mycenaean ring from Knossos’.’ His travels, some in company with his friend J. L. Myres, were published in detail in The Academy, the Journal of Hellenic Studies, the American Journal of Archaeology and in his first Cretan book, Cretan Pictographs and Prae-Phoenician Scripf (I 895). This included a Supplement describing and illustrating the sepulchral deposit from Haghios Onouphrios near Phaistos (Plate 2), in what

Evans, Time and chance (n. I ) 308.

’ Evans, Time and chance (n. 1 ) 310-1 1 .

PETER WARREN: SIR ARTHUR E V A N S A N D HIS A C H I E V E M E N T 20 I

Plate 1 The gorge of Arvi, near which Evans explored sites in 1894. (Photo P. M. Warren 12/8/62)

Plate 2 The hill of Haghios Onouphrios, north of Phaistos, with Mt Ida beyond. (Photo P. M. Warren 23/9/71)

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we can see today is the first account of material from an Early Minoan or prepalatial tholos tomb. This publication, the first on Minoan archaeology, remains today a fundamental work, treating of the Cretan scripts, of links between Crete and Egypt through stone vessels, of Cycladic marble figurines in Crete and of the wide province of the Great Goddess.

These topographical studies will be much illuminated, and their great value in the understanding of the Minoan landscape fully recognized, with the scholarly edition of Evans’s travel diaries by Ann Brown. Her fine work is nearing completion, and will show not least Evans’s skill in drawing, clear in his careful sketches of dozens of Minoan seals seen by him on his travels but not otherwise known. The delicacy of his work in miniature watercolours of Balkan life and people was already remarkably apparent in Mrs Brown’s exhibition at the Ashmolean in 1993. Her beautiful book, accompanying that exhibition, Before Knossos ... Arthur Evans’s Travels in the Balkans and Crete (1993), provides a captivating foretaste. Evans’s understanding of sites is abundantly displayed in these travels too, including his documentation of buildings in Cyclopean masonry in the mountain glens, the upland valleys and basins of east Crete. His accounts have been of fundamental use to the Greek Roads Research team working and excavating there under the direction of Drs Yannis Tzedhakis and Stella Khrysoulaki. Likewise today’s hero of the east Cretan mountains, Dr Krzystof Nowicki, found much of fundamental value in Evans’s topographical publications when compiling his own fine series of articles on his many new sites throughout that grand terrain.

By 1900, then, Evans had given himself a thorough knowledge of the island, its ancient lines of communication, its sites and antiquities: he had, in effect, prepared himself for the archaeological investigation of Knossos. Work began on 23 March 1900. Assisting Evans were Duncan Mackenzie and Theodore Fyfe, the latter as architect. Mackenzie was to be invaluable in all the years of excavation at Knossos, for he had worked on the British School’s excavations at Phylakopi on Melos for four years and had perfected the vital methodology of elucidating pottery stratification. Nicoletta Momigliano’s recent biography has rightly brought out Mackenzie’s role in the Knossian achievement? Though not always an easy partnership, as none of Mackenzie’s ever were, the complementarity of Evans’s and Mackenzie’s collaboration was in many ways ideal. Mackenzie, the excellent field archaeologist, careful recorder of walls, stratigraphy, and finds, with a flare for Minoan ceramics - who with the smallest trace of sensibility could fail to share his devotion to such material? Evans, the man of vision, with his sense of broad historical development, uncanny ability to see significance in the thousands of beautiful and technologically refined discoveries, and his understanding of the critical importance of writing as a basis for civilization, a point fully appreciated by Colin Renfrew in his The Emergence of Civilisation. We should also recall the exceptional work of Evans’s architects, Theodore Fyfe, Christian Doll, and later Piet de Jong, with their accurate, measured plans and elevations of a very large, long-lived, and exceptionally complex palace site.

The discoveries of Knossos are too well known to need summary here, though the excitement of the earliest days leaps out from the records: walls with frescoes unearthed on the second day, the tops of the pithoi in the West Magazines on the seventh day - and let us salute the generosity of Minos Kalokairinos, whose initial probings in 1878 had also

’

I

Nicoletta Momigliano, Duncan Mackenzie: A cautious canny Highlander and the Palace ofMino.7 at Knossos, BICS Supplement 72 (London 1999).

PETER WARREN: SIR ARTHUR EVANS AND HIS ACHIEVEMENT 203

produced pithoi from the Magazines, one of which was given to the British Museum where it can still be seen today in the Minoan Gallery - a truly magnificent specimen even if you are not quite the pithophilos that I am. On the eighth day came to light ‘a kind of clay bar, rather like a stone chisel in shape, though broken at one end, with script on it and what appear to be numerals. It at once recalled a clay tablet of unknown age that I had copied at Candia, also found at Knossos’.’ On April 5th, day fourteen, the Cupbearer fresco, minutely and carefully described by Evans. On April IOth, day nineteen,

Interesting discoveries in the NE chamber early this morning. The earth here is now passed through a sieve so that every bit goes through a double and even a triple examination and every scrap is noticed and set apart. One result was the discovery of what I had always hoped to find: the clay impression of a Mycenaean signet.6

On April 13th, day twenty-two, the nature of the Throne Room with its fully preserved gypsum seat became clear. On day twenty-four,

The great discovery is whole deposits, entire or fragmentary, of clay tablets analogous to the Babylonian but with inscriptions in the prehistoric script of Crete. I must have about seven hundred pieces by now.’

On May 10th Evans was able to write to his father that he had just struck the largest deposits of tablets yet, hundreds of pieces, and the Miniature Frescoes. And so on and so on, in 1901, 1902, 1903. In 1904 came the Zapher Papoura cemetery and the Royal Tomb at Isopata and the Royal Road and the Armoury with its hoard of bronze arrow heads and clay sealings and a tablet referring to 8000 arrows.

Gradually too Evans began to conserve and reconstitute - an excellent word for remaking something as it originally was. Over the years there was some criticism of Evans’s restorations, most of it, in my view, ill-advised and unjustified. How so? For three reasons. Firstly, Evans’s employment of professional, highly skilled architects (Fyfe, Doll, de Jong) throughout the actual course of the excavations enabled accurate assessment of levels, ceiling heights, column sizes, stairways, floors and a myriad other details, with fresco fragments bearing architectural decoration as guides to elevations. Then much of what he found in the East Wing, above all the truly magnificent Minoan engineering achievement of the Grand Staircase, actually existed, but in a collapsed, crushed state. It would have been irresponsible indeed simply to have removed the remains from the site and not to have reconstituted the collapsed but actual floors and flights of stairs back into their original positions. Finally, the presentation to the public. Rose Macaulay’s Pleasure of Ruins offers one valid view of the past; a clean and tidy, grass-border trimmed, one-course preserved, monument offers another, no less valid; a partially and accurately reconstituted building, using as far as possible the original materials, giving the spectator a vision and a feeling of what it was once like to move in these spaces, offers a third, again no less valid. Virtual reality reconstructions through the computer now offer a further, enhanced view of the past. The recent studies by Andreas Lapourtas and Peter Kienzle present valuable new perspectives on this aspect of

Evans, Time und chunce (n. I ) 330-3 I

‘ Evans, Time und chance (n. I ) 332.

’ Evans, Time und chunce (n. I ) 333.

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Evans’s work, while preserving his reconstitutions forms a major part of the current conservation programme at the palace.x

All this is great achievement, by any archaeological standard. The next step is a large one, indeed a huge one when, as in the Aegean, tens of thousands of finds are often involved. This is the conversion of the discoveries into a permanent, published record. I make no apology for claiming that Evans’s record, judged by our contemporary standards, is a very good one indeed; judged, as it has to be, by the standards of his own time, it is perhaps unsurpassed. He produced twenty-three major publications, a few of which I have cited, as well as a considerable number of smaller, but far from negligible works, introductions, invited lectures and the like. Works not so far mentioned, and which remain standard and much used still today, are The Prehistoric Tombs of Knossos, Scripta Minoa I and Mycenaean Tree and Pillar Cult. In this last many of the seminal ideas on Minoan and Mycenaean religion, derived from the iconography of cult scenes on gems, rings, stone vases and wall paintings, are first set out. These religious ideas remain highly convincing, to be studied alongside the books of Nilsson, Persson, Marinatos (father and daughter), Platon, Alexiou, Hagg, Renfrew and others. And there is The Palace of Minos at Knossos, with its 3 108 pages and 2433 text figures. Every significant fact or discovery of Minoan archaeology up to 1935 is here discussed and their comparative relations, with other Minoan finds or with foreign parallels, be they Anatolian, Near Eastern, Cypriot, Egyptian, Libyan, Mainland Greek, Cycladic, Troadic or European, are brought into play. No subsequent treatise on Minoan archaeology has been written without acknowledgement directly expressed or implicit that the book forms the basis of our knowledge of the subject. In relation to The Palace of Minos I eschew Callirnachus’s view ‘&a PtPAiov, &a K ~ K ~ V ’ and align with Thucydides’s ‘ ~ t f j p a kc aki’.

Let us dwell for a moment on the publication of the site of Knossos. This has some bearing on an important aspect of the archaeological process, the matter of inference from excavation. We easily agree on the essentials of a good archaeological publication: to present the evidence, that is to make clear the stratigraphic position and contexts of the finds, or if there is no such clear position - as often happens - to relate the finds stylistically to stratified material, and to interpret the finds, whether inductively or by good theoretical modelling.

It may be claimed for Knossos that these standards are approached if the original reports in the Annual of the British School at Athens and The Palace of Minos are taken together. It is sometimes pointed out that the reports give only a summary account of what was found each year, omitting many details necessary for a proper publication, while The Palace of Minos sets out all the conclusions in the form of nine Minoan periods without establishing exactly the evidence on which all this is based. There is some truth in this. The reports by no means publish everything that was found. A good deal of The Palace of Minos is exposition of Evans’s different theories, and by today’s standards, seen for example in the splendid volumes by Joseph and Maria Shaw and their collaborators currently publishing Kornrnos, Evans’s great work can seem in some ways rather like a richly embellished preliminary report. But it is surely unrealistic to expect a publication like Carl Blegen’s Troy to have been produced early this century. Even so, Evans’s annual reports are quite as good as any produced during the Cretan great first decade of the twentieth century, when most of the major Minoan excavations took place. Moreover Evans and Mackenzie actually retained a

Recent doctoral dissertation work by A. Lapourtas, University of Oxford, and P. Kienzle, University of York.


large, representative selection of the pottery discovered, to allow a veritable industry of subsequent researchers to check material, and, where appropriate, reinterpret or even present it to the world for the first time. Where else was this done on excavations at that date? The Palace of Minos is presented in the form of period succeeding period and the evidence from the whole of Crete is discussed under each period. Wirhin each period the Knossian stratigraphic evidence is presented. The work does not represent a set of conclusions asserted about a series of periods, as if these latter were self-evident. There arc continual and countless citations of stratigraphic evidence, often related to the original reports.

It may further be submitted that, in today’s parlance, Evans’s nine major Minoan periods, based primarily on ceramic development which is used for construction of historical sequence, constitute a model that is open to testing and to modification. It is occasionally fashionable to downplay his period structure as a product of now outmoded nineteenth- century evolutionary or historical thinking of rise,Joruit, decline and fall. It is therefore well worth recalling Evans’s own appreciation of the nature of periodic divisions, in his famous Essai de classification des kpoques de la civilization rninoerzrze ( 1 906), wherein [he periods are first set out.

On ne doit pas oublier non plus, que les dklimitations des trois diffkrentes Cpoques et leur triple subdivision - en suivant les dkbuts, la floraison et la dkgknkrescencc de chacune des phases caractkristiques de la culture minoenne - quoique nkcessaires pour une syst6matization logique, ne sont, aprbs tout, que des bornes artificielles dans un cours ininterrompu dans le fait. Partout on y voit des transitions graduelles, et, presque B chaquc pas, on se heurte B la difficult6 de placer un objet d’art a I’un ou ii I’autre cGtk d’une division quelque peu arbitraire.’

Provided, then, we remember that Early Minoan I1 or Late Minoan I B essentially means that period of time in which the style of pottery we call EM I1 or LM I B existed and we then use this structurc, as the most precise mechanism currently available for measuring relative chro- nology, in order to reconstruct the individual histories or microhistories of Minoan civilisation, such as the development through time of agriculture, architecture, craft technology, economic production and consumption, iconography, political and social structurcs, religion, and international trade, to take just a few examples, then we shall not go far wrong.

How often did Evans fail to get it right ? How often he did get it right we shall consider finally, in a moment. But how often was he wrong? We all know today that his designation of the impressive urban remains on the acropolis north of Kritsa as a prehistoric citadel, Goulas, was incorrect, since this is Classical Lato. We know too that Evans’s placing of the tholos tombs of Mycenae before the Shaft Graves was wrong, though we know from the work of George Stylianou Korres and others that many tholos tombs were as early as the Shaft Graves, if not at Mycenae itself. Evans may also have dated some deposits in the Palace of Minos too early and we have already commented on the volumes themselvcs. On the huge debate about the destruction date of the palace, effectively begun by the latc L. R. Palmer in The Observer in July 1960, my own view is that Evans and Mackenzie, as modified by John Boardman and Mervyn Popham, were substantially correct, with a final destruction of the

’ A. J. Evans, Essai de i~lass@cation des Ppoqries de fa civilization tnbtoenne (London 1906) 4

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palace and its archives of Linear B tablets circa 1375/1350 BC. I would, however, with Palmer, include much of Evans’s and Mackenzie’s reoccupation material in the East Wing within the final destruction, but place it at the Evans-Boardman-Popham date (Late Minoan 111 A 2). Genuine reoccupation material, circa 1200 BC, was found in the South Wing. These are absolutely fundamental, axial moments in Aegean prehistory, but I know that not everyone shares the view expressed here. My mentor, Sinclair Hood, had a view close to this in 1965, but then unfortunately deviated from it later!

Some major theories of Evans would today be considered open to question, though certainly not disproved. The rule of Knossos by a dynasty of priest-kings is an example, while many would not find it easy to argue for a Minoan navy controlling the Aegean seas, though Malcolm Wiener might and I think Stefan Hiller would. By the time of Evans’s death in 194 1 there were no substantial grounds for accepting Mycenaean Greek control of Knossos in its final palatial phase. That was to come with Michael Ventris’s decipherment of Linear B in 1952. I like to think, perhaps naively, that Evans would have taken on board the great explosion of knowledge of the economic and fiscal structures, above all agricultural production and consumption, in the Mycenaean Aegean which the decipherment brought about.

How then are we to assess Evans’s achievement? Peer review, in modern parlance, is one approach. Well, there is not the slightest doubt what Evans’s contemporaries thought of his achievement (Plates 3 & 4”). Besides his Fellowship of both the British Academy and the Royal Society there is a long list of honorary degrees, of gold medals, memberships and presidencies - the highest awards which an astonishing range of learned societies, instit- utions and foreign academies could give. There was too his knighthood and his appointment, already in 1909, as Extraordinary Professor of Prehistoric Archaeology at Oxford.

Another approach to assessment is to ask how Evans stands today. One currently fashionable aspect may be dealt with rapidly, namely the introduction of personal detail into appreciation of public achievement. Omission of such comment (whether or not appropriate in a biography), even in the small compass.of a lecture, might be thought a failing. I reject this, since I believe a person’s known, visible and published achievement is independent of personal considerations, even when, as in Evans’s case, there is plenty of published evidence of his contemporaries’ high regard for him as a person.

What, then, of his public achievement today? In recalling that Minoan archaeology, if it began with Evans’s research travels in 1894, has enjoyed well over half its existence since his death, we are necessarily aware of the immense amount of discovery and information throughout this subsequent period. The sites, finds and publications would require an entire lecture course, but we may note the three palaces of Zakros, Petras and Galatas, all excavated by our Greek colleagues, Doro Levi’s Phaistos, the many Quarriers of Mallia, the palatial character of Arkhanes; Tourkogeitonia, Minoan Khania, Minoan Kommos (a site found by Evans himself in 1924 and first reported in the second volume of The Palace ofMinos) and a wealth of Aegean sites, topped of course by Akrotiri on Thera. Even within this extended galaxy Knossos, its palace, city and cemeteries which Evans excavated and published, stand supreme. And no one, with the possible exception of Doro Levi, equals Evans’s publication record.

In Platas 3 & 4 are taken from prints of photographs given to the author many years ago. Their origin is unknown, so that acknowledgement can be made only indirectly.


Plates 3 & 4 Sir Arthur Evans, aged 85, at the British School at Athens Fiftieth Anniversary Exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington House, October 1936.

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Our concerns today in Minoan and Aegean archaeology, excavation and survey, appropriately lie within a more theoretical framework, with numerous international conferences, monographs and articles devoted to concepts. I gave a merely exemplary list earlier. It is anachronistic to imagine that Evans's work is outmoded because he did not think or work in these terms. In fact, as already outlined, his periodic structure is a relatively explicit model. Other positions, such as that of a dynasty of priest-kings, were not formally constructed, but were theories nonetheless.

An immensely valuable aspect of the post-Evansian world is the application of natural sciences to archaeology. In the Minoan case ceramic provenance studies by chemical and petrographic analyses, in which British scholars have been and currently continue to be at the forefront, are a major example. Organic residue analysis and ancient DNA are at the beginning of their application to Minoan research questions. Evans would have been wholly in support. Analysis of the contents of pots and of the composition of wall plaster, botanical identication of depicted plants, for example, were recorded, cited and encouraged by him.

Everyone is of their time, inevitably influenced by the thought structures and often unquestioned and unquestioning beliefs and attitudes of the day. Evans was a Liberal politically, a historian by training, with an evolutionary perspective in relation to ancient society and art. His vision of a Minoan empire must have reflected, consciously or unconsciously, the British imperial age in which he lived. But, and this is the main point, he possessed an extraordinary ability, based on a remarkably wide and deep range of interests, to see the larger picture, including its myriad details, of the Minoan world, a picture formed not from preconceived theory but inductively or empirically from highly perceptive evaluation of what he found. Many have felt, as I do, that his picture or vision of the Minoans stands close to reality, as hundreds of subsequent discoveries testify. Of course there are modifications - for example human sacrifice, but human sacrifice within the Minoan religious framework, or an absence of empire, but with highly probable forms of Minoan overseas settlement - but his broad picture of that astonishingly sophisticated and beautiful civilization holds. John Sakellarakis, in his study of Evans very percipiently recognized this by concluding:

0 Evans 8k npdna v& E ~ X E (fiaet660 ( w d ~ . 06 pnop060e v& E ~ X E (fioe:t Kai uzd p i ~ ~ i ~ c i Xp6via, Kai vci fizav dvaG acppayi6oyh6cpoG, fi dvaG Baathe6G - Iepe.6~ zfjs Kvoao6. Adv pnopo6ue GiacpoperiKci vci cpdpei UTO cp6~ riq i 6 d ~ q zou y d zfiv p i ~ ~ t ~ q ~ p q t q , r6oo npcjipa, z6ao (oqpci Kai, t6 K U ~ I ~ T E ~ O , z6ao awatci, d n w ~ cpaivezai pd ~ c i 8 ~ . vda epyaaia, via epyaaia, Oewpie~ no6 uric p d p q zou 6dv fitav, nap6 & d d q cpavzauieq."

Yet Evans's greatest achievement and, I would argue, his greatest bequest to us in our attempts to understand the Minoans, is slightly less tangible. It is the notion of history, the sense of sequence, of short-, medium- and long-term continuities and processes present in his thinking and running as a Leitmotif through his publications. We find this not just in the mechanics of our work, such as necessary chronological studies, but in his thinking on fundamentals of Minoan life such as religion, social structure or international relations. So, it is not simply that his ideas and interpretations appear to us frequently still today as the most


convincing reconstructions from the evidence. It is more that these ideas and interpretations are imbued with the historical dimension of Cretan, Aegean, eastern Mediterranean and finally incipient European cultural history. Our main task, often advanced by contributions from the natural sciences, is surely to reconstruct Minoan and Aegean history, or rather the many highly interesting and rewarding microhistories, some of which I cited earlier. These microhistories should then permit the more general or total history of Minoan and Aegean civilization. This was the intellectual framework created for us by Arthur Evans.

University of Bristol

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ST. ALEXIOU, “ H ~ L V W I K ? 6ch pc6’ Ij$opbvov X E I ~ ~ ) V ’ , K~~IzzK&X~OV~K&I~’

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A. J. EVANS, ‘The Tomb of the Double Axes and associated group and the pillar rooms and ritual vessels of the Little Palace at Knossos’, Archaeologia 65 (1914) 1-54.

A. J. EVANS, Essai de classijication des kpoques de la civilization minoenne: rksumk d’un discours fait au Congrks d’Archkologie a Athines, 1905 (London 1906).

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PETER WARREN: SIR ARTHUR EVANS AND HIS ACHIEVEMENT 21 1

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