Anyone who has been to Crete will have felt the almost inescapable sense of millennia of history behind this rather primitive (though warm and hospitable) country of vineyards and tiny farms, steep hillsides and olive groves. Personally I found Knossos a mild disappointment - the ghosts of the august past seemed to have gone for ever, and the jumble of low, barely distinguishable chambers, pillars and halls was visually an anti-climax. Against that, the museum of Cretan art in nearby Heraklion (formerly Candia) was a revelation. Even if you are primed in advance by art histories and guidebooks as to the greatness of Minoan culture, to see its brilliant, varied and strangely timeless artefacts - including wall paintings - in the original is as primal an experience as seeing the Pyramids.
Sir Arthur Evans was a controversial figure even in his lifetime, and I am old enough to remember the arguments and counter-arguments triggered off when Leonard Palmer launched an attack on his reputation and achievements in the early 1960s. Evans seems an easy mark for the nit-picking school of modern scholarship, since he belonged to an entirely different generation and outlook. Essentially he was a late Victorian, working in a period when archaeology was moving from an activity largely dominated by Biblical cranks or mere treasure-hunters into a more scholarly mode. Schliemann's visionary, amateur, Troy dig was not far behind in time, but equally, the relatively scientific methods of the 20th century had not yet fully taken shape. Evans represents some sort of halfway house between the two, which probably explains both his very real achievement and his vulnerability to modern criticism.
Evans was born as long ago as 1851, and he began his work at Knossos in 1894. His father had made a fortune from paper mills and was an amateur antiquarian, while his son left Oxford "a fantastically conceited young man." His work in Crete came to him as a vocation, a special and even unique calling, which he approached with a good deal of scholarly preparation and intensive study. He worked there for most of a busy lifetime and not only disinterred Knossos itself, but through his writing and lecturing shaped an entire world-view of Cretan civilisation which lasted for decades. Evans saw it as a culture of extraordinary grace, style and elegance, quite distinct from the semi-piratical one of Homeric Mycenae or even from contemporary Egypt. He also read into it some of his own refined, late-Victorian sexual puritanism, against almost all the visible evidence.
Crete is undoubtedly an ancient culture, and in the second book of Homer's Iliad, the famous "muster of ships" credits the Cretan contingent of the Achaean host at Troy with a considerable force - 80 ships, no less. Idomeneus, their king, is an important figure in the narrative both in council and war, and in the absence of Achilles, still sulking in his tent, he plays a leading role in the fighting "although his hair was streaked with grey." Homer records ten "races" and many cities in the large island, but his Cretans are still warriors and fighters. Evans, however, preferred to think of Minoan civilisation as essentially non-violent and artistic, even sybaritic, and he also created the quasi-myth of the priest-king serving the cult of a Mother goddess.
His excavation of Knossos was accompanied by "restoration" work which would scarcely pass scholarly muster today. He seems to have made arbitrary decisions, to have given dubious status to chambers like the famous "throne room" and to have rebuilt or retouched on a scale which few or no modern archaeologists would even have contemplated. Local people, of course, loved it all and tourism to the site has been huge over more than half a century. He had put ancient Crete back on the world map. But how much of this is Evans, and how much is true historically?
Scholars can argue about that for another century, at least. This knowledgeable, well-organised book is often censorious of Evans, sometimes even carpingly so, but it also admits his great energies and organising ability and sheer missionary enthusiasm, while not downplaying his vanity and dogmatism or his ingrained tendency to ignore what did not support his own interpretation of prehistory. In his own way he was something of a power-operator, and those who worked with him or under him often found him intractable or overbearing. Evans was probably homosexual by inclination, but he married a woman who was a devoted helpmeet, though she predeceased him by many years. Much later he adopted or became guardian of a boy whom he treated very well, with no suggestion of sexual undertones. Generous and idealistic in his fashion, but also imperious and short-tempered, he lived sumptuously at home in England and was active in bodies such as Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts, while also taking an honourable role in academic life and giving much of his time (and money) to good causes. In every sense, he was a "personality".
However, prehistory is always under revision and well after Evans's death, the brilliant, short-lived scholar Michael Ventris deciphered the Cretan script known as "Linear B" and showed that it was, in fact, a kind of early Greek. It is also generally believed today that Mycenae ("rich in gold" as Homer calls it) had conquered Crete, or part of it, by the time of the destruction of Knossos about 1,200 BC. Some scholars (including our own J.V. Luce) believe this collapse to be due largely to an earthquake on nearby Thera (Santorini), while readers of Emmanuel Velikovsky will remember that he attributes it to some asteroid or interplanetary collision.
It is also widely admitted now that Egyptian culture, which Evans believed had been kept mostly at a seagirt distance, was in fact a considerable shaping force on the island. The ancient Aegean and Mediterranean cultures are probably much more closely related than he had conceived.
Whoever was right or wrong historically (and I am totally unqualified to judge), modern Cretans are generally grateful to Evans for putting their once-great island on the cultural and touristic round again, and for creating an industry which seems likely to last almost indefinitely. His myth-making was creative in itself and those motley crowds who go daily and yearly to the low-lying, strange, sprawling and slightly sinister huddle of buildings which survive from ancient Knossos, are largely a tribute to him and his formidable energies and drive.
There may, to put it vulgarly, have been far too much Bull about Minos and about ancient Crete's supposed cults and rituals. No doubt Evans was inclined to build palaces in the air and to generalise too much on the strength of limited or local evidence. Yet whatever his misjudgements and wishful thinking may have been, he still resurrected a largely forgotten culture and epoch of prehistory which continue to haunt the imagination of the West, or even of people much further afield on our planet. King Idomeneus and his 80 "black ships" (nees melainai) are still afloat, and the Daedalian labyrinths still lure scholar-visionaries into the riddles of exploration and/or supposition.
Brian Fallon is a writer and critic