historical echoes when it came to placing and dating the finds from Knossos.
Sir Arthur Evans was less flamboyant but no less a dreamer. He had been in the island already, hunting for seals with pictographic markings, and in some curious way he was able to predict that when Knossos was cleared and assessed, they would find specimens of Minoan writing. Was it premonition? Or had the disposition of the seals he found given him a clue? He was more plodding than imaginative – though he wrote an excellent travel book about Yugoslavia when a young man. Looking backwards it seems that everything lay at hand, ready for him – a whole civilization which pushed back the old frontiers of prehistory. Cautiously he waited until he could buy the whole site and deal with it carefully, at leisure.
So the great adventure began. Evans’s findings were carefully checked against the typology of objects already unearthed in Egypt and Asia Minor. Egypt was especially helpful, for the desert is an admirable conserver of everything, even papyrus, and the history of this ancient land is more smoothly continuous , less tempestuous than that of the Greek isles where invasions , wars and shattering earthquakes have erupted so often. Egypt was the touchstone; with its help Evans began his, at first, vague and hesitant back-dating of Minoan history. Even today, when the time-chart (still open to correction according to findings ) pushes the history of the place back to 3000 BC , one can feel how momentous the discovery was – and also how difficult and unsure the intellectual act of trying to sort and assign all these fragments. What would be the impressions of a Minoan archaeologist, picking over a heap of mud in a London devastated by an atomic attack – a heap which yields him objects as disparate as a teddy bear, a Father Christmas, a Rembrandt, (was England full of monkeys, and at what epoch?), an Iron Cross, an income tax return … and so on? How would he sortthem out historically and assign a purpose to them? Were the English believers in a bear totem? And was Father Christmas a sort of Zeus? The margin of possible error is disquieting, and should put us a little on our guard against the ‘certain certainties’ that T. S. Eliot refers to.
However chilling the time-chart is to those who hate dates, the thing is well worth a glance. For, in fact, it records the slow emergence of cultural man – with so many failures and collapses , not all of his own manufacture – from a cave-lurker of Neolithic times to a warrior, a priest or an architect, capable of abstract thought and the use of a tool which did duty as an extension of his arm. Completely different animals, one might say. Here is the chart in all its grimness.
NEOLITHIC
4000–3000
EARLY MINOAN I
3000–2800
EARLY MINOAN II
2800 –2500
EARLY MINOAN III
2500 –2200
MIDDLE MINOAN I
2200 –2000
MIDDLE MINOAN II
2000–1750
MIDDLE MINOAN III
1750 –1580
LATE MINOAN I
1580–1475
LATE MINOAN II
1475 –1400
LATE MINOAN III
1400–1200
SUBMINOAN
1200–1000
What all this proved was that the first centre of high civilization in the Aegean area, with great cities and sumptuous palaces , highly developed art, extended trade, writing, and the use of seal stones, was here in Crete. From the end of the third millennium BC , a distinctive civilization came into being which gradually spread its influence over the whole complex of island and mainland states. During the late Bronze Age ( c . 1600– c . 1100) this civilization contributed a kind of cultural uniformity to the Mediterranean scene, which was characterized by theinterlinking of cities and the exchange of goods and artworks. The gradual sway exercised by the kingdom of Minos made his capital Knossos one
Sir Arthur Evans was less flamboyant but no less a dreamer. He had been in the island already, hunting for seals with pictographic markings, and in some curious way he was able to predict that when Knossos was cleared and assessed, they would find specimens of Minoan writing. Was it premonition? Or had the disposition of the seals he found given him a clue? He was more plodding than imaginative – though he wrote an excellent travel book about Yugoslavia when a young man. Looking backwards it seems that everything lay at hand, ready for him – a whole civilization which pushed back the old frontiers of prehistory. Cautiously he waited until he could buy the whole site and deal with it carefully, at leisure.
So the great adventure began. Evans’s findings were carefully checked against the typology of objects already unearthed in Egypt and Asia Minor. Egypt was especially helpful, for the desert is an admirable conserver of everything, even papyrus, and the history of this ancient land is more smoothly continuous , less tempestuous than that of the Greek isles where invasions , wars and shattering earthquakes have erupted so often. Egypt was the touchstone; with its help Evans began his, at first, vague and hesitant back-dating of Minoan history. Even today, when the time-chart (still open to correction according to findings ) pushes the history of the place back to 3000 BC , one can feel how momentous the discovery was – and also how difficult and unsure the intellectual act of trying to sort and assign all these fragments. What would be the impressions of a Minoan archaeologist, picking over a heap of mud in a London devastated by an atomic attack – a heap which yields him objects as disparate as a teddy bear, a Father Christmas, a Rembrandt, (was England full of monkeys, and at what epoch?), an Iron Cross, an income tax return … and so on? How would he sortthem out historically and assign a purpose to them? Were the English believers in a bear totem? And was Father Christmas a sort of Zeus? The margin of possible error is disquieting, and should put us a little on our guard against the ‘certain certainties’ that T. S. Eliot refers to.
However chilling the time-chart is to those who hate dates, the thing is well worth a glance. For, in fact, it records the slow emergence of cultural man – with so many failures and collapses , not all of his own manufacture – from a cave-lurker of Neolithic times to a warrior, a priest or an architect, capable of abstract thought and the use of a tool which did duty as an extension of his arm. Completely different animals, one might say. Here is the chart in all its grimness.
NEOLITHIC
4000–3000
EARLY MINOAN I
3000–2800
EARLY MINOAN II
2800 –2500
EARLY MINOAN III
2500 –2200
MIDDLE MINOAN I
2200 –2000
MIDDLE MINOAN II
2000–1750
MIDDLE MINOAN III
1750 –1580
LATE MINOAN I
1580–1475
LATE MINOAN II
1475 –1400
LATE MINOAN III
1400–1200
SUBMINOAN
1200–1000
What all this proved was that the first centre of high civilization in the Aegean area, with great cities and sumptuous palaces , highly developed art, extended trade, writing, and the use of seal stones, was here in Crete. From the end of the third millennium BC , a distinctive civilization came into being which gradually spread its influence over the whole complex of island and mainland states. During the late Bronze Age ( c . 1600– c . 1100) this civilization contributed a kind of cultural uniformity to the Mediterranean scene, which was characterized by theinterlinking of cities and the exchange of goods and artworks. The gradual sway exercised by the kingdom of Minos made his capital Knossos one
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