Treasure Seekers: Glories of the Ancient Aegean Page #4

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the tiny sealstones used to press

a design into wax or clay.

Their intricate symbols reminded him

of picture writing

like the Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Could it be that

this early European civilization

had also mastered the art of writing?

And if it was so advanced,

thought Evans,

then surely another civilization

must have preceded it.

He seemed to feel almost instinctively

that there had to be something earlier.

I think that as one of the

great contributions, really,

that Evans made was the sense

that Mycenaean art wasn't the

beginning of something;

it was the end of something.

So he had this sense that there

must be something earlier to find.

And that, of course, was one of

the things that pointed him

in the direction of Crete.

In 1893, Evans' wife Margaret

died of tuberculosis.

The couple had been living

in Oxford for ten years

where Evans served as director

of the Ashmolean Museum.

Without his companion,

Evans was bereft.

For the rest of his life he would only

write on black bordered note paper.

Clearly, he needed a new adventure.

His mind returned to

his meeting with Schliemann

and the enigma of the sealstone.

He'd heard that the island of Crete

was full of these little treasures.

It was time to see for himself.

In 1894, Arthur Evans went to Crete,

a sleepy island in the Aegean Sea.

In ancient times it had been fabled

as a rich and populous land.

Now under the control of

the Ottoman Turks,

it was timeless and unspoiled.

Exactly the sort of place

Arthur Evans liked.

He traveled all over the island looking

for sealstones unearthed by the plow.

Here women called them 'milkstones'

and wore them around their necks

to ensure enough milk for their babies.

Finally, he came to a great mound,

still identified by the locals

as the site of Knossos,

in Greek mythology,

the palace of King Minos.

Arthur Evans couldn't resist

the power of the myth,

that beneath this hill once lay the

labyrinth of the monstrous Minotaur.

As the story goes,

every year the City of Athens

was required to send tribute

to King Minos.

Seven youths and seven maidens were

sent into the labyrinth

to face the Minotaur,

the terrifying monster half man

and half bull.

No one came out alive.

Then a youth named Theseus

devised a scheme

to mark his trail with

a ball of thread.

The hero met the Minotaur

in a great battle.

Triumphant,

he followed the thread to freedom.

When Arthur Evans arrived

at the great mound,

it looked like any other hill

with no evidence of a palace,

let alone a labyrinth.

But Evans met a man who had found some

huge storage jars close to the surface.

He claimed there was much more

waiting beneath the earth.

Evans began to negotiate with

the land's Turkish owners.

It took him five years

and the patience

to wait until Crete gained

its independence from the Turks.

Evans had learned as a collector

that the only way really to control

an artifact was to own it.

So Evans decided to own

his greatest artifact,

and to buy Knossos

because he knew that as landowner

he would have a right to do

whatever he wanted on it.

On the 23rd of March 1900,

Arthur Evans broke ground at Knossos.

In an effort to heal scars

from the recent war for independence,

he hired both Muslims and Christians,

men and women, to work the dig.

Evans himself was almost overcome

with excitement.

There is a bit of schizophrenia

almost in Evans

where he is trained by his father

as the scientific archeologist.

At the same time,

the romantic explorer is desperate

to get at the treasure.

It didn't take long.

Exactly one week

after he began digging,

Arthur Evans found clay tablets

inscribed with two different systems

of writing never seen before.

Evans called them

'Linear A' and 'Linear B.'

He would spend the rest of his

long life trying to decipher them.

Even more extraordinary lay in wait.

Arthur Evans found in the very

first week of his excavation

a wonderful gypsum throne,

a stone throne still it in a place,

in a room beautifully decorated with

frescos, it was flanked by griffins.

And he was instantly able

to announce to the world

this is the oldest throne in Europe,

this is the beginning of

European civilization.

The civilization Evans was uncovering

seemed amazingly advanced.

While the rest of Europe

was still living in huts,

these ancient people had resided

in comfort and splendor.

Essentially it really was like

a grand European palace

where you had running water actually

running through the building itself.

This sort of thing, most of Evans'

readers in the London Times didn't have.

You know, flushing toilets in their

own houses and fresh water

running through the houses.

Elated by the extraordinary treasures

of Knossos,

Evans boldly announced to the world

that he had found a completely unknown,

unimagined civilization.

Older than Schliemann's Mycenae,

and more than 15,000 years

older than classical Greece.

He decided these remarkable

ancient Europeans needed a name.

'Minoan' he called them

after the legend of King Minos.

This time Arthur Evans

had found a cause

equal to his boundless imagination.

As the years went on,

the challenges set in.

Winter storms damaged

the vulnerable ruins.

Evans realized he had to

devise a way to protect them.

It was only the beginning of

his conservation problems.

Soon his workmen found evidence that

the palace had actually had

several stories.

Evans sent two experienced silver

miners tunneling into the earth.

They dug for weeks,

eventually revealing the remains of

four magnificent flights of stone steps.

Evans found the only way

to preserve the staircase

was to restore it to its former glory.

All it would take was

a bit of imagination.

Really what started off as a first-

aid to keep the building in tact

grew out of hand a little bit

because he began to really enjoy

what he was doing.

Little by little, Evans began

to restore Knossos.

Using his own fortune,

he transformed the ruins into rooms,

based on his personal vision

of Minoan architecture.

The project was controversial

from the start.

Evans used modern materials

like steel and reinforced concrete,

melding the ancient with the latest

in 20th century architecture.

Evans was trying to recreate

a total experience in the same way

that we try to set up

virtual reality mazes

where people can experience

architecture.

Evans was trying to do the same thing

at Knossos.

He was criticized for building

a movie set,

and in a sense that is

what he was doing.

He wanted people to be able to walk

through and experience the building.

But really one is experiencing

Evans' vision

more than anything else

when you visit Knossos.

Even Evans critics today admit that

the palace would be a confusing maze

without his unifying vision.

As more and more ruins continued

to be unearthed,

Evans hired architects to help him

make sense of the twisting

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