1000+ images about Sir Arthur Evans on Pinterest | Ancient greece, The western and Illustrations Pinterest • The world’s catalog of ideas Sir Arthur Evans Sir Arthur John Evans (8 July 1851 – 11 July 1941) was an English archaeologist most famous for unearthing the palace of Knossos on the Greek island of Crete and for developing the concept of Minoan civilization from the structures and artifacts found there and elsewhere throughout the eastern Mediterranean. Evans was the first to define Cretan scripts Linear A and Linear B, as well as an earlier pictographic writing. 22 Pins100 Followers Sir Arthur Evans, archaeologist at Knossos on Crete Sir Arthur Evans The English archaeologist Sir Arthur John Evans (1851-1941) is the man who put Knossos on the map. He was educated at the famous public school, Harrow, and then at Oxford University, before becoming curator of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford when he was 33‑years‑old: a job he held for the next 24 years.

It was while here that he developed an interest in the coins and seals of Ancient Greece, and in particular those of Crete , which he first visited in 1894 in order to learn more. Sir Arthur Evans' Excavations at Knossos By 1899 he had begun excavations at Knossos, and quickly unearthed a Bronze Age city and a royal palace which he named Minos after the Cretan King and son of the Greek God Zeus. He called the civilisation Minoan, and while the bulk of the important excavations were done in the first few years of the 20th century, Evans continued work on the site until 1935 - by which time he was 84-years-old. Controversial Reconstruction The most controversial aspect of his work is that he began to try to reconstruct the royal palace, and to re-paint it, so as to give us some idea of what it would have looked like at the time. To some scholars this was sacrilege, while to others it was a bold attempt to bring the palace back to life, and to convey some of its grandeur to the general public.

Anyone who has seen the museum at the Agora in Athens , splendidly reconstructed by the American School of Archaeology, will have some sympathy with this view. Linear A and Linear B Another important discovery Sir Arthur Evans made at the site were 3000 clay tablets covered with two distinct types of indecipherable writing. One of these was referred to as Linear A , which is regarded as the language of the Minoans and has still not been fully deciphered to this day. The other was called Linear B , and this was not understood until 1952 when it was shown to be the language of the Ancient Greeks dating back to about 1500-1400 BC. This was an important step in understanding the development of the Ancient Greeks, as it showed that they had a written script much earlier than had previously been thought. Evans himself worked on books in which he attempted to decipher the two scripts, but he will be most remembered as the man who discovered the Minoan Palace of Knossos.

Less well-known is the fact that he was also a journalist in his early days, was a war correspondent in the Balkans, and in the 1880s researched and wrote a book that would sadly have been just as relevant a century later: the plight of the Slavs and Albanians in the regions of Bosnia and Herzegovina, at that time struggling for their independence from Turkey. It was after this that Evans took up his job at the Ashmolean, which eventually led him to Knossos. He was created a Knight of the British Empire in 1911, and died in 1941 at the age of 90. Knossos Palace & Archaeological Site, Crete island, Greece The celebrated palace of Knossos. The most magnificent Minoan monument, residence of the mythical king Minos. The archaeological site of Knossos (Knosós GR: Κνωσός) is sited 5 km southeast of the city of Iraklion. There is evidence that this location was inhabited during the neolithic times (6000 B.C.) .

On the ruins of the neolithic settlement was built the first Minoan palace (1900 B.C.) where the dynasty of Minos ruled. This was destroyed in 1700 B.C and a new palace built in its place. The palace covered an area of 22,000sq.m, it was multi- storeyed and had an intricate plan. Due to this fact the Palace is connected with thrilling legends, such as the myth of the Labyrinth with the Minotaur. Between 1.700-1.450 BC, the Minoan civilisation was at its peak and Knossos was the most important city-state. During these years the city was destroyed twice by earthquakes (1.600 BC, 1.450 BC) and rebuilted. The city of Knossos had 100.000 citizens and it continued to be an important city-state until the early Byzantine period. The site was discovered in 1878 by Minos Kalokairinos (GR: Μίνως Καλοκαιρινός).

The excavations in Knossos began in 1.900 A.D. by the English archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans (1851- 1941) and his team, and they continued for 35 years. Knossos gave birth to famous men like Hersifron and his son Metagenis, whose creation was the temple of Artemis in Efesos, the Artemisio, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. The most important monuments of the site are: The Great Palace It is the largest of the preserved Minoan palatial centres. Four wings are arranged around a central courtyard, containing the royal quarters, workshops, shrines, storerooms, repositories, the throne room and banquet halls. Dated to 2000-1350 B.C. Archaeology - Ancient History Encyclopedia Archaeology by Maisie Jewkes published on 15 July 2013 Archaeology is a wide subject and definitions can vary, but broadly, it is the study of the culture and history of past peoples and their societies by uncovering and studying their material remains, i.e. tools, ruins, and pottery .

Archaeology and history are different subjects but have things in common and constantly work with each other. While historians study books, tablets, and other written information to learn about the past, archaeologists uncover, date, and trace the source of such items, and in their turn focus on learning through material culture. As much of human history is prehistoric (before written records), archaeology plays an important role in understanding the past. Different environments and climates help or hinder the survival of materials, e.g. papyri can survive thousands of years in the hot and dry desert but would not survive in damp conditions. Waterlogged conditions, such as bogs, can preserve organic material, like wood, and underwater wrecks are also excavated using diving equipment. Working everywhere from digging in the ground to testing samples in laboratories, archaeology is a wide-ranging discipline and has many sub-sections of expertise. The two rapidly widening areas are experimental archaeology and ethnoarchaeology. Experimental archaeology tries to recreate ancient techniques, such as glass making or Egyptian beer brewing. Ethnoarchaeology is living among modern ethnic communities, with the purpose of understanding how they hunt, work, and live. Using this information, archaeologists hope to better understand ancient communities.

Archaeology of the Past The first scientific excavation has been attributed to Thomas Jefferson in Virginia, USA. Archaeology as an academic study, career, and university subject is a fairly recent development. Nevertheless an interest in the past is not new. Humankind has always been interested in its history. Most cultures have a myth or story that explains their foundation and distant ancestors. Ancient rulers have sometimes collected ancient relics or rebuilt monuments and buildings. This can often be seen as political strategy - a leader wanting to be identified with a great figure or civilisation from the past. On the other hand, ancient leaders have also been known for their curiosity and learning. King Nabonidus of Babylon , for example, had a keen interest in the past and investigated many sites and buildings. In one temple he found the foundation stone from 2200 years before. He housed his finds in a kind of museum at his capital of Babylon. The Roman and Greek historians wrote books about the past, and the stories of famous heroes and leaders have come down to us. However, modern archaeology, or at least its theories and practice, stem from the antiquarian tradition.

In the 17th and 18th centuries CE, wealthy gentleman scholars, or antiquarians as they are also known, began to collect classical artefacts. Fuelled by interest they began to make some of the first studies of sites, like Pompeii , and drew ancient monuments in detail. The first scientific excavation has been attributed to Thomas Jefferson (third president of the United States of America) who dug up some of the burial mounds on his property in the state of Virginia, USA. The beginnings of modern field techniques were pioneered by General Augustus Lane-Fox Pitt Rivers, who excavated barrows at Camborne Chase with systematic recording and procedure. In the USA in the 1960s CE, archaeology went through a phase of new theories, often called processual archaeology. This approach has a scientific approach to questions and designs models to suggest answers and test its theories. Famous Archaeologists Archaeology is a time consuming study; it often takes many years of toil before an archaeologist makes a breakthrough or discovers a site. Famous archaeologists are often connected to their most famous find or theory.

To name the score of people who worked and made developments in archaeology would take a hundred pages; what follows are but a few: Howard Carter, an Englishman, who in 1922 CE discovered the tomb of the pharaoh Tutankhamun in Egypt ; Leonard Woolley spent years excavating the ancient city of Ur in Mesopotamia ; Heinrich Schliemann unearthed what is believed to be the mythical city of Troy , building on work done by an amateur archaeologist, Frank Calvert; Sir Arthur Evans excavated much of Knossos (on the island of Crete ) and developed the concept of Minoan Civilisation. Remove Ads Advertisement These men are all well known for their famous finds but also made developments in field archaeology and techniques, although Heinrich Schliemann’s methods of digging down very quickly and only recording the earlier levels are today questioned and criticised, as are the reports that he smuggled artefacts out of the country. Others such as Sir Mortimer Wheeler, Sir William Flinders Petrie, and Gordon Childe are famous for their methods of recoding, precision in excavations, and approaches to archaeology theory.

Mary and Louis Leakey worked for many years in East Africa transforming our knowledge of human development and pushing back the dates of humans ancestors by millions of years. The work of other individuals, not all classified as archaeologists but rather as scholars, who worked for decades on the study of languages, should be mentioned. Jean-Francois Champollion cracked the Egyptian hieroglyphics in 1822 CE. Tatiana Proskouriakoff worked in the later half of the twentieth century CE on the problems of Maya hieroglyphic writing and contributed to the final breakthrough. In the 1850s CE Henry Rawlinson cracked the Mesopotamian cuneiform script . Minotaur: Sir Arthur Evans and the Archaeology of the Minoan Myth: Amazon.co.uk: Alexander MacGillivray: 9780712673013: Books Product Description Amazon Review Arthur Evans leapt into the public imagination with his discovery in 1900 of the Palace of Knossos on Crete, interpreted as the mythical lair of the Minotaur.

Though a jewel in a golden age for archaeology, then, as now, questions have been asked about Evans's excavations and conclusions. In the richly detailed Minotaur, Professor MacGillivray, who has himself excavated Crete, suggests that the man who gave us the very term "Minoan" provides a prime example of "how archaeological discovery occurs first in the mind". By examining Evans's life and work through his actions and correspondence, MacGillivray shows that Evans's evidence was "fully, even exaggeratedly exploited" but rarely reviewed. Adventurous, energetic and highly observant, Evans also displayed "single-minded arrogance", "pomposity and manifest racism"--traits which MacGillivray feels, along with his independence of operation, resulted in misinterpretation. The book also incorporates an interesting potted history of war-torn Crete and the Balkans and Evans's involvement in the region's politics. It finally outlines modern theories on Minoan civilisation, though the "Palace and surrounding buildings are crumbling as fast as Evans's intellectual reconstruction", so that "solid proof" is increasingly problematic.

Fascinating as a portrait of the man who "gave the world a new chapter in its ancient history" and for its portrayal of the developing discipline of archaeology, Minotaur also bubbles with an intriguing and highly important undercurrent which asks to what extent archaeologists are ever "impartial observers". --Karen Tiley --This text refers to the Hardcover edition. Book Description Sir Arthur Evans - Famous Archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans - Famous Archaeologist Updated on September 6, 2013 Bust of Sir Arthur Evans at Knossos Source Anthropology and the classics: six lectures delivered before the University of Oxford How amazing - this volume has been created from the actual recordings of lectures given by famous founding archaeologists - Sir Arthur Evans among them. This volume is produced from digital images created by the Internet Archive for The University of Toronto Libraries. The digital reformatting process results in an electronic version of the original text that can be both accessed online and used to create new print copies. Sir Arthur Evans 1851-1941 Famous for the uncovering of the Minoan palace of Knossos on Crete, Sir Arthur Evans placed his own unique interpretation on what he revealed.

His controversial theories about the ancient Minoans were scorned by many. Sir Arthur was also criticised for his restoration work at Knossos using materials unknown to the Minoans such as reinforced concrete. His liberal approach to the restorations of several frescoes also came under fire, yet no one can deny his success as a founding father of archaeology . He was one of the first archaeologists to use a large scale systematic methodology. His legacy survives him in the classic works he published and in the name he gave the civilisation he uncovered - The Minoans. He is remembered for his excellence in scholarship, his intuitive grasp and his creative imagination. We owe our knowledge of the Minoan Civilisation to Sir Arthur Evans. Fossil hunters Sir Arthur Evans and Eugene Dubois Source Source About Sir Arthur Sir Arthur was the son of Sir John Evans, an eminent numismatist (coin expert), prehistoric archaeologist and successful businessman. As a boy he was fascinated with the inscriptions on his father's coins and artefacts. Sir John's wealth allowed the young Arthur to be well educated. Sir Arthur achieved notoriety and success as a student and through his adventures as a young man.

He served as a war correspondent in Bosnia in the 1870s where he identified a number of Roman roads and towns. Physically he was a small man, but was noted for his toughness and and tenacity. He was also a respected scholar and held the curatorship of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford from 1884-1908. He went on to become a profesor of prehistoric archaeology at Oxford in 1909. He was knighted in 1911. The Island of Crete Source Excavations at Knossos Crete was a Turkish possession until 1898. After independence from the Turkish Ottoman Empire, the local government on Crete allowed excavations to go ahead at Knossos. They had previously banned excavations for fear that anything discovered would be seized by the Turks and removed to Istanbul. Sir Arthur had been to Crete in 1894-5 with a friend, John Myres (who was later to win fame for his excavations on Cyprus). The two were hunting for artefacts and sites. They both believed the ancient Greek myths were based on historical fact.

Myres and Sir Arthur had an interest in digging at Kephala (Knossos) along with another famous archaeologist - Heinrich Schliemann. At that time the Turks were still in control and no one was successful in terms of excavation. Sir Arthur eventually purchased the site at Kephala. It took roughly four years from when he commenced the dig in March 1900 to uncover the 13,000 square metre palace complex site. He continued to work on the site for approximately thirty years, during a period that encompassed two world wars. Work still continues at Knossos. The Palace Complex at Knossos Source Fresco in the Throne Room at Knossos Source Knossos was a Literate Society Among the spectacular finds of Knossos, Sir Arthur uncovered a large number of clay tablets or stone seals containing a style of hieroglyphic script. Sir Arthur postulated a theory of the picture-writing literacy of the Cretan islands languages "Linear A" and "Linear B" found on these stones. Linear A has never been deciphered. Linear B was ultimately determined to be an ancient form of Greek by Michael Ventris in 1953.

Deciphering Linear B Criticism of Sir Arthur Sir Arthur restored parts of the palace at Knossos during his excavations. He used reinforced concrete to rebuild walls, rooms and columns. He painted the renovated columns and other structures in tones that reflected paint fragments he found on the structures. See the picture below for an example. He has been much criticised for this on the basis that the ancient Minoans could never have used reinforced concrete. Sir Arthur was enthusiastic about what he found, declaring one room to the the 'Throne Room' of King Minos , relying heavily on Greek mythology. He restored the throne room room in what he thought was a fitting manner. He has been criticised for this type of enthusiasm. Modern archaeologists avoid 'over-interpretation' and the use of modern materials in restoration. The chronology Sir Arthur created for Knossos was inconsistent with the work of others in the same field. Later investigations of Knossos revealed the miscalculations made by Sir Arthur and showed that the connection with King Minos was closer to romance than reality. He has even been condemned by some as a falsifier of history. He overrated the importance of Cretan culture in the early Aegean history.

Nonetheless no one can doubt the truly spectacular nature of what he uncovered or the brilliance of his scholarship. Sir Arthur Evans was not a treasure hunter, unlike several of the earlier archaeologists. He had a genuine love of his work and was dedicated to the study of ancient history. Sir Arthur is celebrated by a large bust placed at the palace at Knossos (pictured above). Thank you for your visit! Thanks for stopping by. If you like my work please do vote and leave feedback. Please feel free to leave a comment and checkout my other work by clicking on the links below. Thanks again for your visit - Mel. Restoration of Knossos Sir Arthur EvansBarbarism and Civilization Sir Arthur Evans Minoan archaeology cannot really be understood properly without considering the controversial figure of Sir Arthur Evans. Arthur Evans not only excavated the Palace of Minos, the greatest of the Cretan palaces, but he also invented the Cretan civilisation, being the first to recognise it as being a distinct civilisation all of its own. He was a powerful and controversial figure, and currently opinion is swinging rather against him, so one cannot understand the Minoans without understanding something of Arthur Evans and trying to navigate between him and his detractors.

Sir Arthur Evans as painted by Sir William Richmond, surrounded by some of the objects he dug up from the Palace of Minos Arthur Evans was born in 1851, the son of Sir John Evans who made an immense fortune from his paper works that subsidised all his son’s later archaeological work. His father, John Evans was born into a middle-class family but his uncle, John Dickinson built up a very successful paper works. John joined it and then married the boss’s daughter — his cousin — and was taken into partnership. He then gradually took over the running of the firm and greatly expanded it, inventing envelopes in the process. John Evans was also a very distinguished archaeologist, playing a major role in the work that led up to Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species. John Evans studied flints: his most famous exploit was when he went as a representative of the learned bodies to France to see the sites in the Somme valley where hand axes were being discovered alongside extinct animals, thus proving that they belong to a very extinct era. He wrote books on both The Ancient Stone Implements, Weapons and Ornaments of Great Britain, similarly on The Bronze Implements, as well as a book on The Coins of the Ancient Britons.

He became President of the Society of Antiquaries, and was a long term President of the Royal Numismatic Society. This eldest son Arthur was born to the purple. After an academic career, first at Harrow School and then at Oxford, (where foolishly he read history instead of classics) he travelled around Europe and in particular the Balkans observing the dying days of the Ottoman Empire and taking great sympathy with the oppressed peoples in the Balkans and indeed in Crete. His liberal ideals and beliefs came to the front and on one occasion he was in put in prison for his activities. He was also a correspondent for the Manchester Guardian for whom he wrote fiery dispatches. Then in 1884 he at last got a proper job, when he was appointed as Keeper (i.e. director) of the Ashmolean Museum, the Oxford University Museum which claims to be the oldest museum in the world.

The museum at that time was in the doldrums, having just suffered the loss of its natural history material to the new Natural History Museum (now the Pitt Rivers Museum), but Evans revived the museum, expanding the collections not only with his father’s material and also eventually with his own, but also acquiring a huge collection of classical and renaissance material from C D E Fortnum, of the family of the Fortnum and Mason grocery store, and also persuading him to put up £10,000 towards the building of a major extension at the back of the museum to accommodate all the new exhibits. But his work at the museum did not prevent him from taking extensive holidays abroad and in particular he became intrigued with small amulets with an unknown script which came from the island of Crete. He was determined to track them down, discovered the site at Knossos in the middle of Crete, just inland from what is today the major town of Heraklion, where spasmodic excavations had already begun to reveal an extensive site. He was able to purchase the whole site, and set about excavating, and in five seasons from 1900 to 1905 he laid bare the full enormous palace.

There were several later seasons on the periphery, but he then spent the rest of his life writing a report on his excavations in four massive volumes and at the same time building up the whole history of what he named the Minoan civilisation, assigning it to 3 phases, the Early Minoan (EM) the Middle Minoan (MM), and the Late Minoan (LM). Two of his activities in particular proved controversial. The first was his restoration of the palace. In his first season of excavating, he came down on what he called the ‘throne room’ but when he returned for the second season he found that it had suffered from the winter floods and that the walls that he had exposed would need protection. However, when he returned to Knossos after the great World War in the 1920s he began what many considered to be a process of over-restoration. He used the latest techniques of reinforced concrete. Indeed Cathy Gere in her book on ‘Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism’ says that ‘the palace enjoys the dubious distinction of being one of the first re-enforced concrete buildings on the island’. Boys for Vogue?

How far does this show a Minoan youth, and how far does it reflect the artisitic ideals of the 1920s? In addition he employed the father and son team of artists both called Emile Gilliéron to do restoration drawings of the fragments of wall paintings that he discovered: the resulting drawings are 10% wall plaster and 90% Gillieron’s imagination, — based on Evans’ ideas. People often remark on the similarity between Cretan painting and art nouveau; but this is because Gilliéron was an art nouveau artist. Girls for Vogue? Though I don’t think Vogue would show bare breasted girls with quite the aplomb of the Minoans Evelyn Waugh had the aesthetic acumen to remark that the Gillierons had ‘tempered their zeal for accurate reconstruction with a somewhat inappropriate predilection for covers of Vogue’. In the 1970s, there was considerable criticism of Evans for his over-restoration, restoring the palace to two stories high when only the foundations of the ground floor remained. Today a sort of uneasy truce is in place: a visit to Knossos is splendid theatre, and should not archaeologists be encouraged to use their imagination to bring sites alive?

The current criticisms concern Evans’ interpretation, not only of Knossos but of the whole Minoan civilisation, and are well expressed in Cathy Gere’s book Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism. Evans wrote his great book in the 1920s and 30s. He had been too old to take part in the Great War himself – he was 63 at the outbreak of war and he spent much of the war running the Society of Antiquaries as president, protecting the British Museum from the War Office as a trustee, and pressing the cause of the South Slavs, which eventually resulted in the creation of an independent Yugoslavia. But his original liberalism, combined with a pacifism resulting from the Great World War, led him to reconstruct the Minoan society as a peaceful society in which women played a leading role, a belief encouraged by the statuettes that he discovered or restored with the famous depictions of Minoan women in long flounced skirts but bare breasts. Many were intrigued by his vision. It fitted in well with the Nietzsche philosophy. Oswald Spengler adopted it in his magnum opus ‘The Decline of the West’.

Freud was deeply influenced, as was Picasso who drew a portrait of the Minotaur and incorporated it in his famous painting of Guernica. Henry Miller sums it all nicely: Knossos in all its manifestation suggests the splendour and sanity and opulence of a powerful and peaceful people. It is gay – gay, healthful, sanitary, salubrious … far closer in spirit to modern times … than other later epochs of the Hellenic world … I felt, as I have seldom felt before the ruins of the past, that here throughout the long centuries there reigned an era of peace … The religious note seems to be graciously diminished; women played an important equal role in the affairs of this people; a spirit of play is markedly noticeable. In short, the prevailing note is one of joy. It was a splendid image for the interwar period and was hugely successful, a splendid alternative to capitalism, communism and fascism: but how does it play today? Evans died in 1941 a disillusioned man, but his legacy lives on.

Knossos is certainly one of the great World Heritage sites; his system of Early Minoan, Middle Minoan and Late Minoan, even though he himself realised that it did not correspond to the periods of the palace, forms the basic categorisation for the period and has been imitated on the mainland of Greece with the Early, Middle and Late Helladic and the same for the Cycladic cultures. And he was the first and I think only person to establish a new “civilisation” in Europe. Sometimes Evans’ exuberance goes a little over-the-top, but ultimately we cannot but admire the man who not only discovered the Minoans, but who also demonstrated as never before how archaeology can reconstruct the past. Sir Arthur Evans | Barbarism and Civilisation Barbarism and Civilisation A new history of the world Search The third century Sir Arthur Evans Minoan archaeology cannot really be understood properly without considering the controversial figure of Sir Arthur Evans. Arthur Evans not only excavated the Palace of Minos, the greatest of the Cretan palaces, but he also invented the Cretan civilisation, being the first to recognise it as being a distinct civilisation all of its own.

He was a powerful and controversial figure, and currently opinion is swinging rather against him, so one cannot understand the Minoans without understanding something of Arthur Evans and trying to navigate between him and his detractors. Sir Arthur Evans as painted by Sir William Richmond, surrounded by some of the objects he dug up from the Palace of Minos Arthur Evans was born in 1851, the son of Sir John Evans who made an immense fortune from his paper works that subsidised all his son’s later archaeological work. His father, John Evans was born into a middle-class family but his uncle, John Dickinson built up a very successful paper works. John joined it and then married the boss’s daughter — his cousin — and was taken into partnership. He then gradually took over the running of the firm and greatly expanded it, inventing envelopes in the process. John Evans was also a very distinguished archaeologist, playing a major role in the work that led up to Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species. John Evans studied flints: his most famous exploit was when he went as a representative of the learned bodies to France to see the sites in the Somme valley where hand axes were being discovered alongside extinct animals, thus proving that they belong to a very extinct era.

He wrote books on both The Ancient Stone Implements, Weapons and Ornaments of Great Britain, similarly on The Bronze Implements, as well as a book on The Coins of the Ancient Britons. He became President of the Society of Antiquaries, and was a long term President of the Royal Numismatic Society. This eldest son Arthur was born to the purple. After an academic career, first at Harrow School and then studying classics at Oxford, he travelled around Europe and in particular the Balkans observing the dying days of the Ottoman Empire and taking great sympathy with the oppressed peoples in the Balkans and indeed in Crete. His liberal ideals and beliefs came to the front and on one occasion he was in put in prison for his activities. He was also a correspondent for the Manchester Guardian. Then in 1884 he was appointed as Keeper (i.e. director) of the Ashmolean Museum, the Oxford University Museum which claims to be the oldest museum in the world.

The museum at that time was in the doldrums, having just suffered the loss of its natural history material to the new Natural History Museum (now the Pitt Rivers Museum), but Evans revived the museum, expanding the collections not only with his father’s material and also eventually with his own, but also acquiring a huge collection of classical and renaissance material from C D E Fortnum, of the family of the Fortnum and Mason grocery store, and also persuading him to put up £10,000 towards the building of a major extension at the back of the museum to accommodate all the new exhibits. But his work at the museum did not prevent him from taking extensive holidays abroad and in particular he became intrigued with small amulets with an unknown script which came from the island of Crete. He was determined to track them down, discovered the site at Knossos in the middle of Crete, just inland from what is today the major town of Heraklion, where spasmodic excavations had already begun to reveal an extensive site. He was able to purchase the whole site, and once Crete broke away chaotically from the Ottoman domination, he set about excavating the whole site.

And in five seasons from 1900 to 1905 he laid bare the full enormous palace. There were several later seasons on the periphery, but he then spent the rest of his life writing a report on his excavations in four massive volumes and at the same time building up the whole history of what he named the Minoan civilisation, assigning it to 3 phases, the Early Minoan (EM) the Middle Minoan (MM), and the Late Minoan (LM). Two of his activities in particular proved controversial. The first was his restoration of the palace. In his first season of excavating, he came down on what he called the ‘throne room’ but when he returned for the second season he found that it had suffered from the winter floods and that the walls that he had exposed would need protection. However, when he returned to Knossos after the great World War in the 1920s he began what many considered to be a process of over-restoration. He used the latest techniques of reinforced concrete.

Indeed Cathy Gere in her book on ‘Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism’ says that ‘the palace enjoys the dubious distinction of being one of the first re-enforced concrete buildings on the island’. Boys for Vogue? How far does this show a Minoan youth, and how far was it influenced by artisitic ideals of the 1920s? In addition he employed the father and son team of artists both called Emile Gilliéron to do restoration drawings of the fragments of wall paintings that he discovered: the resulting drawings are 10% wall plaster and 90% Gillieron’s imagination, — based on Evans’ ideas. People often remark on the similarity between Cretan painting and art nouveau; but this is because Gilliéron was an art nouveau artist. Girls for Vogue? Though even Vogue wouold not I think, show bare breasted girls with quite the aplomb of the Minoans Evelyn Waugh had the aesthetic acumen to remark that Gillieron had ‘tempered their zeal for accurate reconstruction with a somewhat inappropriate predilection for covers of vogue’.

In the 1970s, there was considerable criticism of Evans for his over-restoration, restoring the palace to two stories high when only the foundations of the ground floor remained. Today a sort of uneasy truce is in place: a visit to Knossos is splendid theatre, and should not archaeologists be encouraged to use their imagination to bring sites alive? The current criticisms concern Evans’ interpretation, not only of Knossos but of the whole Minoan civilisation, and are well expressed in Cathy Gere’s book Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism. Evans wrote his great book in the 1920s and 30s. He had been too old to take part in the Great War himself – he was 63 at the outbreak of war and he spent much of the war running the Society of Antiquaries as president, protecting the British Museum from the War Office as a trustee, and pressing the cause of the South Slavs, which eventually resulted in the creation of an independent Yugoslavia.

But his original liberalism, combined with a pacifism resulting from the Great World War, led him to reconstructing the Minoan society as a peaceful society in which women played a leading role, a belief encouraged by the statuettes that he discovered or restored with the famous depictions of Minoan women in long flounced skirts but bare breasts. Many were intrigued by his vision. It fitted in well with the Nietzsche philosophy. Oswald Spengler adopted it in his magnum opus ‘The Decline of the West’. Freud was deeply influenced, as was Picasso who drew a famous portrait of the Minotaur and incorporated it in his famous painting of Guernica. Henry Miller sums it all nicely: Knossos in all its manifestation suggests the splendour and sanity and opulence of a powerful and peaceful people.

It is gay – gay, healthful, sanitary, salubrious … far closer in spirit to modern times … than other later epochs of the Hellenic world … I felt, as I have seldom felt before the ruins of the past, that here throughout the long centuries there reigned an era of peace … The religious note seems to be graciously diminished; women played an important equal role in the affairs of this people; a spirit of play is markedly noticeable. In short, the prevailing note is one of joy. It was a splendid image for the interwar period and was hugely successful, a splendid alternative to capitalism, communism and fascism: but how does it play today? Evans died in 1941 a disillusioned man, but his legacy lives on. Knossos is certainly one of the great World Heritage sites; his system of early Minoan, middle Minoan and late Minoan, even though he himself realised that it did not correspond to the periods of the palace, forms the basic categorisation for the period and has been imitated on the mainland of Greece and in the islands of the Cyclades in the early middle and late Helladic and the same for the Cycladic cultures.

And he was the first and I think only person to establish a new “civilisation” in Europe. Sometimes Evans’ exuberance goes a little over-the-top, but ultimately we cannot but admire the man who not only discovered the Minoans, but who also demonstrated as never before how archaeology can reconstruct the past. The contribution of Arthur Evans | kbolman The contribution of Arthur Evans Articles about Crete The contribution of Arthur Evans On Friday 23 March 1900 at 11 a.m. Arthur Evans began his excavation of Knossos. Although he was not the first to excavate at the site, that honour belongs to a Greek appropriately called Minos Kalokairinos in 1878, it was to be Evans who uncovered the Knossos Palace and brought to light a hitherto unknown civilisation — possibly the oldest in Europe. The basic excavation of the site took four years and for the rest of his life Evans continued working on the site, reconstructing and building, often in an attempt to preserve the remains from the weather to which they had been exposed for the first time in 3,500 years.

The West Facade and the West Court Evans designated the building at Knossos a palace and named the civilisation that had built it the Minoans, after King Minos of Greek mythology. Since then the actual function of the building and of the other palaces has been questioned and new interpretations advanced. Alternative views consider the four large palaces of Minoan Crete to be temples or administrative centres or both, and in one interpretation, Knossos is seen as a necropolis — a huge burial site to which only a small band of priests and embalmers had access. The latest theory is that the palace was not inhabited by the rulers of Knossos but was used as a place of ceremony. Here, following convention, the name Palace is used throughout. Evans, like all of us, was a product of his time, and his time was Victorian England. He was an amateur archaeologist as were many archaeologists at the time. Only wealthy men of leisure could afford to carry out the kind of archaeological dig that Evans carried out at Knossos and professional archaeologists received even less government support then than they do now.

We are fortunate that Evans was a rather better archaeologist than many of his generation, thanks in part to his father, himself an amateur archaeologist. No less important, he had the support of an excellent team of British archaeologists including Theodore Fyfe and Duncan Mackenzie as well as talented Greeks including the Cypriot Gregorios Antoniou and the Cretan Emmanouel Akoumianakis, known as Manolaki, who much later was killed fighting the Germans in the Battle of Crete. It could have been worse Mackenzie, in particular, was to play a crucial role in the excavations as he kept daybooks in which he recorded all the developments at the excavation site. He probably had the most scientific approach of any archaeologist working in the Aegean at that time. Sadly he later suffered from severe mental illness which rendered him incapable of working. Although much criticism has been levelled at Evans in the intervening 100 years for the way in which he rebuilt parts of Knossos, matters might have been worse still if Heinrich Schliemann had succeeded in buying the site of Knossos.

The story goes that if the Turk who was selling the land had not exaggerated the number of olive trees included in the sale and thereby incensed the businessman in Schliemann then he and not Evans would have been the owner of the site and Knossos might have been excavated in the same insensitive way that Schliemann excavated Troy. Given Evans’ background in the wealthy middle class of Victorian England it is not surprising that he superimposed an image of British monarchical society onto Minoan society. Evans identified Knossos as a palace and then set about identifying the various rooms used by the Kings and Queens of the Minoans. He also rebuilt large parts of the site. In some cases this was clearly unavoidable. The great staircase, for example, would have collapsed onto the workmen on the site if action had not been taken to restore it. Thankful It is perhaps a fruitless task to criticise from the position of today’s scientific approach to archaeology what Evans did then. We should be grateful that he was willing to sink so much of his personal fortune into the excavations at Knossos and devote the rest of his long life to the study of the Minoans.

We don’t have to accept everything he said about that civilisation — a further 70 years of excavations have taken place since Evans’ death. But Evans provided the basis on which all further study of Minoan society has been based. Sir Arthur Evans - The Full Wiki The Full Wiki More info on Sir Arthur Evans Wikis Sir Arthur Evans: Wikis Advertisements Note: Many of our articles have direct quotes from sources you can cite, within the Wikipedia article! This article doesn't yet, but we're working on it! See more info or our list of citable articles . Related top topics (Redirected to Arthur Evans article) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia For other people named Arthur Evans, see Arthur Evans (disambiguation) . Arthur Evans Bronze statue of Sir Arthur Evans at Palace of Knossos Born Knossos Sir Arthur John Evans (8 July 1851 – 11 July 1941) was a British archaeologist most famous for unearthing the palace of Knossos on the Greek island of Crete and for developing the concept of Minoan civilization from the structures and artifacts found there and elsewhere throughout eastern Mediterranean .

Evans was the first to define Cretan scripts Linear A and Linear B , as well as an earlier pictographic writing. Along with Heinrich Schliemann , Evans was a pioneer in the study of Aegean civilization in the Bronze Age . The two men knew of each other and Evans visited Schliemann's sites. Schliemann had planned to excavate at Knossos, but died before fulfilling that dream. Evans bought the site and stepped in to take charge of the project that was then still in its infancy. He continued Schliemann's concept of Mycenaean civilization but soon found that he needed to distinguish it from his own concept - the Minoan. Contents Family background The Nash paper mill Arthur Evans was born in Nash Mills , England , the first child of John Evans and Harriet Ann Dickinson. John Evans came from a family of men who were both educated and intellectually active; his father, Arthur's grandfather, had been headmaster of Market Bosworth Grammar School . John knew Latin and could quote the classical authors . In 1840, instead of going to college, he started work at a paper mill owned by his maternal uncle John Dickinson .

He married his cousin and employer's daughter, Harriet, and in 1851 was made a full partner in the family business. [1] Profits from the mill would eventually help fund Arthur's excavations and restorations at Knossos and resulting publications. John maintained his status as a chief officer in the company, which eventually became John Dickinson Stationery , but also distinguished himself as an antiquary and numismatist , and as a geologist and archaeologist, publishing works on these topics. He was a member and officer of many learned societies , including being a Fellow of the Royal Society . He won the Lyell Medal and in 1892 was knighted by Queen Victoria . Unfortunately, Arthur's mother, Harriet, died in 1858 when Arthur was seven. He did have two brothers, Norman and Lewis , and two sisters, and would remain on excellent terms with all of them all of his life. He was raised by a stepmother, Fanny, with whom he also got along very well. She had no children of her own and also predeceased her husband.

John's third wife was a classical scholar, and when he was 70 they had a daughter, Joan , who would become an art historian. By the time of John's death in 1908 at 85, when Arthur was 57, the major work on Knossos had already been done. He had primarily used other funding for his work, but Arthur had enjoyed the close support and assistance of his father, who contributed significantly. Education Arthur was given every advantage of education. After a childhood stay at Callipers Preparatory School (no longer extant) he attended Harrow School , becoming co-editor of The Harrovian in his final year, 1869/70. [2] At Harrow he was friends especially with Francis Maitland Balfour . [3] After graduating from Harrow, Evans became part of and relied on the Old Harrovian network of acquaintances. Minchin characterized him as "a philologer and wit" as well as an expert on " the eastern question ", i.e. diplomatic and political problems posed by the decay of the Ottoman Empire .

Arthur also continued his father's habit of quoting the appropriate Latin author from memory and knew poems entirely by heart, as was typical for men of his time. Between 1870 and 1874 Arthur matriculated at Brasenose College , Oxford . His housemaster at Harrow, F. Rendall, had eased the way to his acceptance with the recommendation that he was "a boy of powerful original mind." At Brasenose he read modern history, but his summertime activities with his brothers and friends were perhaps more definitive to his subsequent career. In 1871 he and Lewis visited Hallstatt and the Balkans ; in 1872 he and Norman adventured in the Carpathians , crossing borders illegally at high altitudes, pistols at the ready. In 1873 he and Balfour tramped over Lapland , Finland , and Sweden . Everywhere he went he took copious anthropological notes and made numerous drawings of the people, places and artifacts.

[4] During the Christmas holidays of 1873, Evans cataloged a coin collection being bequeathed to Harrow by John Gardner Wilkinson , the father of British Egyptology , who was too ill to work on it himself. The headmaster had suggested "my old pupil, Arthur John Evans - a remarkably able young man." [5] In April-July 1875, after failing to obtain a fellowship at Oxford, Arthur attended a summer term at the University of Göttingen . He decided not to stay and left there to meet Lewis for another trip to the Balkans. That decision marked the end of his formal education. However, at that time, the lack of a formal education did not preclude one from being a successful scientist. Adventures in the Balkans After resolving to leave Göttingen, Arthur and Lewis planned an adventure in Bosnia-Herzegovina starting immediately in August 1875. They knew that the region, a part of the Ottoman Empire , was under martial law , and that the Christians (mainly the Serbs ) were in a state of insurrection against the Bosnian Muslim beys placed over them.

Ottoman troops were in the country in support of the beys. The two brothers had no problem with either the Serbs or the Ottomans but they did provoke the neighboring Austro-Hungarian Empire , and spent the night in "a wretched cell." After deciding to lodge in a good hotel in Slavonski Brod , having judged it safer than Bosanski Brod across the Sava River , they were observed by an officer who saw their sketches and concluded they might be Russian spies. Politely invited by two other officers to join the police chief and produce passports, Arthur replied, "Tell him that we are Englishmen and are not accustomed to being treated in this way." The officers insisted and, interrupting the chief at dinner, Arthur suggested he should have come to the hotel in person to request the passports. The chief, in a somewhat less than civil manner, won the argument about whether he had the right to check the passports of Englishmen by inviting them to spend the night in a cell. Crete and the palace at Knossos A portion of Arthur Evans' reconstruction of the Minoan palace at Knossos. This is Bastion A at the North Entrance, noted for the Bull Fresco above it.

Evans had been interested in the prehistory of Crete for some time before he was able, in 1900, to begin the massive excavations at Knossos that made his name; he was already deciphering script on Cretan seal stones in 1894. The excavation and restoration of Knossos, and the discovery of what he called the Minoan civilisation , would be largely driven by Evans as an individual. In modern science, archaeology is a field of academic teamwork requiring certain credentials and where methods and findings are subject to the close scrutiny of peers; a century ago a project could be driven by one wealthy and self-taught person. The ruins at Knossos had been discovered in 1878 by Minos Kalokairinos, an island merchant and antiquarian , who conducted the first dig at Kephala Hill. The Turkish government interrupted his work, and although several people attempted to continue, it was not until the island was declared an independent state that Evans was able to purchase the entire archaeological site . Assisted by Dr. Duncan Mackenzie , who had already distinguished himself by his excavations on the island of Melos , and Mr.

Fyfe, an architect from the British School at Athens , Evans employed a large staff of local labourers as excavators, and began work in 1900. Within a few months they had uncovered a substantial portion of what he called the Palace of Minos. The term " palace " may be misleading; Knossos was an intricate collection of over 1000 interlocking rooms, some of which served as artisans' workrooms and food processing centres (e.g. wine presses). It served as a central storage point, and a religious and administrative centre. On the basis of the ceramic evidence and stratigraphy , Evans concluded that there was another civilization on Crete that had existed before those brought to light by the adventurer-archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann at Mycenae and Tiryns . The small ruin of Knossos spanned 5 acres (20,000 m2) and the palace had a maze-like quality that reminded Evans of the labyrinth described in Greek mythology . The labyrinth had been built by King Minos to hide the Minotaur , a half-man half-bull creature that was the offspring of Minos' wife, Pasiphae, and a bull.

Evans dubbed the civilization once inhabiting this great palace the Minoan civilization. By 1903, most of the palace was excavated, bringing to light an advanced city containing artwork and many examples of writing. Painted on the walls of the palace were numerous scenes depicting bulls, leading Evans to conclude that the Minoans did indeed worship the bull. In 1905 he finished excavations. He then proceeded to have the room called the throne room (due to the throne-like stone chair fixed in the room) repainted by a father-and-son team of artists, the Émile Gillérons Junior and Senior. While Evans claimed to be basing the recreations on archaeological evidence, many of the best-known frescoes from the throne room were almost complete inventions of the Gillérons. [6] Scripta Minoa - The source of the Phoenician alphabet Main articles: Linear A and Linear B Evans found 3,000 clay tablets during excavations and worked to transcribe them. From the transcriptions it was clear that the tablets bore traces of more than one script.

Evans dated the Linear A Chariot Tablets at Knossos as immediately prior to the catastrophic Minoan civilization collapse of the 15th century BC. [7] Evans, in his 1901 work Scripta Minoa, claimed [8] that most of the symbols for the Phoenician alphabet ( abjad ) are almost identical to the many centuries older, 19th century BC, Cretan hieroglyphs . The basic part of the discussion about Phoenician alphabet in Scripta Minoa, Vol. 1 takes place in the section Cretan Philistines and the Phoenician Alphabet, pages 77–94. Modern scholars now see it as a continuation of the Proto-Canaanite alphabet from ca. 1400 BC, adapted to writing a Canaanite (Northwest Semitic) language. The Phoenician alphabet seamlessly continues the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, by convention called Phoenician from the mid 11th century, where it is first attested on inscribed bronze arrowheads.

[9] Legacy The Ashmolean Museum Evans was knighted in 1911 for his services to archaeology and is commemorated both at Knossos and at the Ashmolean Museum , which holds the largest collection of Minoan artifacts outside of Greece. In 1913 he paid £100 to double the amount paid with the studentship in memory of Augustus Wollaston Franks , established jointly by the University of London and the Society of Antiquaries , which was won that year by Mortimer Wheeler . Evans was also known for his own obstinate Creto-centrism which led to unfriendly debate between himself and the mainstream archaeologists Carl Blegen and Alan Wace .[citation needed] From 1894 until his death Evans lived on Boars Hill , near Oxford. His house, Youlbury, has since been demolished. He had Jarn Mound and its surrounding wild garden built during the Great Depression to make work for local out-of-work labourers. Evans left part of his estate to the Boy Scouts and Youlbury Camp is still available for their use. Publications Evans, Arthur John (1876).

Through Bosnia and the Herzegóvina on foot during the insurrection, August and September 1875; with an historical review of Bosnia and a glimpse at the Croats, Slavonians, and the ancient republic of Ragusa. London: Longmans, Greens and Co.. Downloadable Google Books. Evans, Arthur John (1901). The Mycenaean Pillar Cult and its Mediterranean Relations with Illustrations from Recent Cretan Finds. MacMillan and Co. Limited. Downloadable Google Books. Evans, Arthur John; Index by Joan Evans (1921, 1928, 1930, 1935, 1936). The Palace of Minos: a comparative account of the successive stages of the early Cretan civilization as illustrated by the discoveries at Knossos. London: MacMillan and Co. Downloadable Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg. Line notes ^ A.G. (December, 1908). "Sir John Evans, K.C.B., 1823-1908".

Proceedings of the Royal Society (Royal Society of London) LXXX: l-lvi. Downloadable Google Books. ^ Dauglish, MG (1901). The Harrow School Register, 1801-1900 (Second ed.). London, New York, Bombay: Longmans, Green & Co. p. 343. Downloadable Google Books. ^ Minchin, James George Cotton (1898). Old Harrow days. London: Methuen Co. p. 205. Downloadable Google Books. ^ Brown, Ann Cynthia (1993). Before Knossos: Arthur Evans's Travels in the Balkans and Crete (Illustrated ed.). Ashmolean Museum. pp. 11–19. ISBN 1854440292, 9781854440297. ^ Thompson, Jason (1992). Sir Gardner Wilkinson and His Circle. University of Texas Press. p. 343. ISBN 0292776438, 9780292776432.

^ Gere, Cathy Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009), 111. ^ Hogan, C. Michael (2007) Knossos ^ Evans, A.J. (1909), Scripta Minoa - Volume 1, Oxford, p. 87,89 ^ Markoe (2000), p. 111. Sources Cottrell, Leonard (1957). The Bull of Minos. An account of the archaeology of Crete for the general reader, with much information about Evans's work. Evans, A.J. (1901). Scripta Minoa - Volume 1. Evans, A.J. (1952). Scripta Minoa - Volume 2. Evans, A.J. (1933). Jarn Mound. Hogan, C. Michael (2007) Knossos, The Modern Antiquarian [1] Markoe, Glenn E.(2000). Phoenicians. University of California Press.

ISBN 0-520-226135 (hardback). Powell, Dilys (1973). The Villa Ariadne. Originally published by Hodder & Stoughton, London. Ross, J. (1990). Chronicle of the 20th Century. Chronicle Australia Pty Ltd. ISBN 1872031803. MacGillivray, J Alexander (2001). Minotaur - Sir Arthur Evans and the Archaeology of the Minoan Myth. Published by Pimlico, a division of Random House. (Originally published by Jonathan Cape in 2000). Arthur Evans - Ancient Illyria: An Archaeological Exploration (Hardcover)

Question: The archaeologist SirArthur Evans is most famous for his excavations concerning which civilisation?
Answer: Minoan